


Nucleus

by ampersand_ch



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Character Death (not Sherlock or John), Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Explicit Sexual Content, First Kiss, First Time, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Grief/Mourning, Injured Sherlock, Insight, Kid Victor Trevor, Kidnapping (of a child), Love, M/M, Music, Post-Episode: s04e03 The Final Problem, Psychotherapy, Revenge, Romance, Sherlock Plays the Violin, True Love, emotional exhaustion, musgrave, sherrinford
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-25
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2018-12-19 18:56:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 39,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11904111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ampersand_ch/pseuds/ampersand_ch
Summary: Sherlock attends therapy sessions with Ella to work through his family history. In doing so, he stumbles upon another issue that's been buried deep down inside him. This story picks up immediately at the end of series 4 and contains spoilers.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SwissMiss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SwissMiss/gifts).
  * A translation of [Nukleus](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11902479) by [ampersand_ch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ampersand_ch/pseuds/ampersand_ch). 



> Thank you so much, SwissMiss, for your translation!  
> I once more cannot find the words to express my joy and gratitude ...

"Why don't you tell me what this is all about, Mr Holmes."

Sherlock was struggling. Struggling for the one word that was so omnipresent it felt as if it had merged with his very flesh. Yet it still wouldn't let itself be pinned down. Or perhaps that was the reason he couldn't pin it down. It was everywhere. Everywhere.

"It's taken us four sessions to get to this point," Ella Thompson said calmly. "But now we're here, Mr Holmes. Tell me what insights you've gained."

"John." The word came so haltingly and softly from Sherlock's mouth that it was almost inaudible.

Ella Thompson nodded and waited. Waited for him to continue. But Sherlock didn't have any words other than that one. That single one which took so much effort that he suddenly felt exhausted and adrift.

Four sessions. That was how long he'd talked about Eurus, explained what had happened, spoken of his parents and Mycroft. Victor. Redbeard. Everything he'd suppressed and only rediscovered recently. Sketchy memories. Fragments of happiness and light. Along with a deep awareness of a darkness. Confusion. Fear. A disturbing realisation of being alone. Abandoned. Betrayed. Lied to. Lied to by everyone. The decision never to trust anyone, never to believe anything again. And the crystal-clear knowledge that he needed to be strong all on his own. To lift himself above things on his own power in order to survive. The need to be good. Better than the others. "My mental superiority protects me," he'd said. With utter conviction.

It had taken four sessions to arrive at the point at which they were now. The point that hurt. That hurt so much Sherlock didn't want to see it. That sucked all the strength out of his body when he looked at it.

"Tell me about him," Ella said.

The brief illusion of having been a family. Mary and John and he and the baby. A sense of home. Broken in his hand like a piece of fine-spun glass that shattered when you tried to hold it, its shards piercing the skin and boring into the flesh, making it hurt and bleed. Scabby, infected, pus-filled, unable to heal because tiny splinters were still embedded.

"I liked Mary," Sherlock said in a low voice.

Ella waited. Gave him space, allowed him time to think, to reflect. Silence spread in the therapist's office, bonding with the light that flooded the room through the large window. Outside, it was summer.

"You reconciled with John after the blow-up," Ella said. She sat there so calmly in her big chair, relaxed, her notebook on her lap.

"Yes." Sherlock closed his eyes. He felt tired and dull. They hadn't really talked, he and John. Hadn't cleared things up. They'd apologised to each other, after a fashion. Decided to be friends again. Then Eurus had involved John and they'd gone through hell together. Afterwards they'd resumed their lives. His at Baker Street, John leading another one somewhere else.

"He was with you when everything happened with your sister and your memories returned of your childhood friend."

"Yes. Yes, he was with me." That bottomless sense of fatigue. It settled over Sherlock like a heavy blanket. He sat slumped down in the comfortable armchair, and for a moment he was afraid he would fall asleep if he didn't focus. "He was the one who found Victor's bones. In the well. He's a doctor. He saw that they weren't dog bones."

"And he told you as much."

"Yes. He told me right away when he recognised them. He was still in the well, chained down."

"What was going on with you at that moment?"

Sherlock ran his hand over his face. That moment. He didn't know anymore. He couldn't remember what he'd felt. All he remembered was the fear. The awful fear for John that had seized him after Eurus had talked to him, after the shock. The panic that he might lose John too. And the superhuman effort it took not to simply break down and give up, but to solve the puzzle. To stay focused. To save John. To do everything, anything, to save John. John, John, John. It was always John. Always.

"I'm quite tired," Sherlock said. His eyes were still closed.

"You're emotionally exhausted, Mr Holmes."

"I know."

"Talk to John."

Sherlock slowly shook his head. "He has enough going on with work and the baby."

"Do you still see each other?"

"Rarely."

"Why?"

"It simply doesn't come up."

"He doesn't help you with cases anymore?"

"I haven't taken any cases I might need him for. Just small things I can solve quickly on my own."

"Why?"

"He has a daughter who needs her father."

It was quiet for a long time; absolute silence in the therapist's office. Just the sound of Ella's pen on the paper as she took notes.

Then Ella said, "You take the time to fly to that island twice a week to play music with your sister. With a woman who interfered in your life in an extremely destructive manner."

"She's my sister. And she needs me." Sherlock's reaction was brusque.

Ella Thompson didn't follow up, simply let the statement hang in the room. No comment. She simply fell silent. 

Finally, Sherlock muttered guiltily, "I know. I should get in touch with John."

"Why don't you?"

Sherlock didn't answer. The bottomless fatigue for one thing. The time that slipped away between meetings with Eurus. He simply had no strength left to see John.

"What happened between you and your friend, Mr Holmes?"

"I don't know."

There was just that painful void. The ground was gone beneath his feet. He was living an empty life, without really participating in it. He wasn't even taking drugs anymore. He was functioning like a robot. He was functioning, but something wasn't right. He didn't know what it was, or why. He didn't even know whether he'd lost John or not.


	2. Shards

Sherlock stood at the window. Eyes closed, playing by heart. He loved the Largo from Bach's Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor. The clear, steady Largo took its own sweet time, developed so smoothly; unencumbered. His violin really came into its own with the soft agogic of the middle tones. Sherlock also loved the sprightly, breathless chase of the Vivace, and especially the third movement, the Allegro, simmering incessantly in the background, a pulsating volcano. But the Largo was something special. Sherlock knew it was a dangerous piece. Full of longing and affection, both unavoidably on display when played. They played it sometimes, he and Eurus. Not often, but once in a while. The two melodies twining around each other, into each other, provocative counterpoints, asking, answering, cosying up. There was both joy and a deep, abiding peace in the master composer's ingenious opus.

Sherlock listened to the warm tones of his instrument. He added the second part in his head. He missed it, yearned for it, for its physical presence: the sonorous harmony of Eurus's violin. There was an unexpected magic when their instruments met, when their sounds found each other, accompanied and carried each other. He was addicted to it. To the intimate, wordless manner of communication. They were so similar, he and his sister, so closely related; so familiar. And yet he avoided Eurus when they played the Largo. He always closed his eyes, as he did now. The Largo belonged to him. Eurus accepted that. 

He thought of John when he played this movement. Dreamt of a deep peace. Of comfort. Of security. Of trust and devotion. He thought of John when the two melodies touched and danced around each other, reached into each other and merged. In those moments, his heart clenched, pain and longing flowing into his instrument, into his bow, and from there into the music. Eurus heard it. She could read his thoughts. He had no doubt about that. But she didn't say anything, didn't ask. She provided the second voice, yet remained mute herself.

Sherlock heard the outside door open downstairs, just as he was starting the ascending legato theme, where it was picked up by the second violin, reinforced and confirmed. A gently rocking back-and-forth. Footsteps on the stairs. A vibration more than an auditory fact. A ripple, a quake that his body registered with all its senses, perceived a thousand times over, memorised all the way down to his subconscious. John's footsteps. He was hesitating. Sherlock could hear it: the hesitation before he knocked.

"Come in," Sherlock called without interrupting his playing. He didn't even open his eyes.

John entered the living room and stopped, indecisive. Sherlock could hear it, feel it. But he kept playing a few more measures, played the warm, inquisitive theme twice, three times. There was no audible response. Sherlock set down the instrument and turned around.

"I'm about to pick Rosie up from Mrs Hudson and thought I'd stop in," John said. "The babysitter's sick and Mrs Hudson offered to step in at the last minute."

So much explanation and justification. John had a key to the flat. For Sherlock, it was still their shared flat. It would always be their shared flat, even if John didn't live here anymore.

John looked exhausted. He gestured clumsily toward the violin. "Nice piece. What is it?"

"Bach. Double concerto."

John nodded. "How are you doing?"

"Fine," Sherlock lied and indicated the two chairs in front of the fireplace. "Have a seat." He put the violin into its case and loosened the bow.

"Mrs Hudson says you've been playing a lot. Practically day and night," John said, not reacting to the invitation to sit.

"I'm practising some pieces I play with Eurus. It's quite challenging. Eurus is quick. I bring her the sheet music and a couple of days later she has everything memorised. Tea?"

"I don't want to make Mrs Hudson wait long. I promised her I'd pick the little one up on time." John checked his watch. "I only have a couple of minutes."

"Then get the baby and bring her up."

"Not a good idea. Rosie's usually tired by this time. In fact she's probably already asleep and I'll need to wake her. She'll be cranky and reacts poorly to people she doesn't know."

People she doesn't know. A lump gathered in Sherlock's chest. "How are you?" he asked. He didn't know what else to say or ask.

"Making do. I have a babysitter for Rosie where I can leave her overnight if necessary. That's a big help."

Sherlock nodded uncertainly. John was standing here, standing right in front of him, and Sherlock didn't know what to say to him. All these things about children were so foreign to him. He was still standing at the window. 

"Maybe Rosie and I should get to know each other better," he suggested.

"Why?"

Surprised, Sherlock looked into the serious, tired face of his friend. The question shocked him. 

"I'm her godfather," he said slowly.

John's muscles tightened. Sherlock could see it happening. His body stiffened. His lovely, curved lips narrowed into a thin line. His hands clenched briefly into fists before relaxing again. He looked away from Sherlock before speaking. "If Mrs Hudson hadn't dragged you out of the flat and into the church, you wouldn't have even come to the christening. You'd forgot about it."

The bitterness was unexpected. The space between them filled with a chill. Sherlock swallowed over a dry throat.

"I was in the middle of a case."

"I know. No one could help noticing. You were tapping away at your phone through the entire ceremony."

"The case was in a critical phase." Sherlock was ashamed as he heard himself say the words, even if they were true.

"It's fine. You made your priorities clear at any rate." John's grey eyes were mirrored surfaces behind which a storm-whipped sea roiled. "You didn't even know her name. You didn't respond to my text. You didn't so much as read it. It didn't interest you."

The lump in Sherlock's chest had become massive. "I'm sorry. I was an arse." His voice cracked.

They stared at each other. The silence leaden. A wall of grey.

"Okay." John lowered his gaze. A long silence. Then he said, his voice low, "I didn't come here to cast blame on you, Sherlock. I don't want to dig all of that up again. I'd prefer to forget it, in fact. Or at least forgive it. It's just – I'm working on these things with Ella at the moment and..." John broke off. "Sorry. I had a really rough day at work."

Sherlock nodded, confused. 

"I'd better go get Rosie."

"Wait."

John had already reached the door, but now he stopped and turned back to Sherlock.

A pause. Sherlock tried to focus, not to say anything wrong. To communicate what he really meant. No avoidance strategies. 

"Would you have time, sometime?" he asked cautiously. "For us. For dinner. Or for tea?"

They watched each other. Sherlock felt himself trembling inside. His heart was thudding so hard he could feel it. Such a struggle. So much effort to ask for a bit of time from this man with whom he'd shared so much. Hours, months, years. Day and night.

"Sure," John answered lightly. "I'll just need to plan it in."

"Tomorrow night?"

"It's too short notice for the evening. I'd need to arrange someone for Rosie. I might be able to do the afternoon. We could go to the park."

Neutral ground then. Regent's Park. They both knew it well, had often gone for strolls there, before. To get some fresh air in the evening. Or to refuel during complex cases, to go over and consolidate the facts, share conjectures and suspicions, to question, ponder, discuss, evaluate, deduce. Or on days without cases. Escaping the boredom, silent beside each other, each pursuing his own thoughts.

"Agreed," Sherlock said. "When?"

"I'll try to be at the duck pond at three."

"Okay."

"I'll need to be able to reach you in case of an emergency or if I can't make it for some other reason. In other words, you should read the texts on your phone even if they're from me and start with Hi."

A fine glass blade. The insult unforgotten. Another one added. All of the tiny poison darts. Humiliations he'd inflicted on John. Thorns in his flesh. John added them to the untold horrors, the catastrophes, the hopeless mountain of disappointments and grief. 

Sherlock swallowed hard before saying, "I'll read your texts. I promise."

"You don't need to promise. It'll be enough if you do it." His displeasure unmistakeable.

Razor-thin shards. Sherlock reached out for the back of the chair beside him and held it fast. The floor beneath his feet was drifting. He shivered. 

"Sorry," John said unhappily. "Definitely not a good day today. I shouldn't have come. I apologise."

"It's good that you came," Sherlock said quietly. "I'm grateful." The lump in his chest was so thick he could hardly breathe.

"I'll see you tomorrow then."

"Yes, see you tomorrow."

They stood there, the space between them insurmountable. John's grey eyes so intent. So familiar. Yet so foreign. So much uncertainty. So much doubt. There was a brief moment, though. An acknowledgment. A glimmer. A memory. An ancient feeling, somewhere deep down. A surge of warmth and pain that welled up, inundating Sherlock, scraping him raw and drenching him in balsam at the same time. Taking away all his strength and making moisture shoot into his eyes.

John took a heavy breath, hesitating. A few seconds of indecision. Then he looked away, turned and left.

 

*

 

The wide, old-fashioned corridor in Bart's smelt of disinfectant. The linoleum flooring had a slight give to it beneath his feet, seeming to shift. Sherlock felt off-balance. He shouldn't have come here. He should have said no, should have turned down Lestrade's request. To view a corpse now. With Molly, and no John. Molly's face disapproving, closed off. John should be here. John would make everything different, would have given him strength, drawn him along, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. They would have examined the body together; solved the case together.

Sherlock struggled with the long corridor and the smell. What was going on? Why was he so weak? So unsteady on his feet? He had a headache too. Sherlock made a beeline for a window and stopped there. He'd stood somewhere along here with Mycroft back then, after they'd told him Irene was dead. _All lives end. All hearts are broken_. Mycroft's cynical nuggets of wisdom. His ice-cold, devastating house of cards. The demons along the way. 

Sherlock leaned his hands on the window sill and looked down at the inner courtyard. This weakness was worrisome. It was like his entire system was paralysed. The exhaustion and lack of direction were frightening. The deep-seated need to curl up and hide. To lock himself in and do nothing else but play the violin, to clear everything else away. Set it all aside. Make a clean sweep of his life and start afresh. Plough the field and sow new seed. Start over. Now that everything was different anyway. Even his past. Now that the ground beneath his feet was shifting and everything he'd thought he knew was crumbling away. Now that his own memory turned out to be a fraud and he couldn't even rely on his own mind anymore. What was left? John?

Sherlock closed his eyes. Even if he cleared everything else out of his life, John would still be there. That was obvious. John couldn't be cleared away. He was in every pore of Sherlock's body, in every grain of earth in his field. John was woven into his very being to a worrisome degree. He couldn't be excised. Not without an operation that would see him bleed to death.

One of the ambulances started up down in the courtyard. Sherlock opened his eyes and watched the vehicle as it rapidly drove out through the gate, turning on its lights and siren once it was on the street.

_All hearts are broken_. How true. And in a completely different way than he and Mycroft had imagined back then. Irene was part of the past, even if she'd made contact again. One of the demons along the way that he'd left behind. That he'd long since passed by. Nothing more than a will'o'the'wisp memory.

And Molly. Molly was no demon from the past. Molly was flesh and blood, the present, an indispensible part of his work. He was scared to face her again. He hadn't been here at the morgue since everything that happened at Sherrinford. Not alone anyway, just together with John. John had been the one who insisted they talk to Molly.

"You can't just leave it like this, Sherlock," he'd said. "She deserves an explanation, for you to tell her why it all happened."

John had pressured him until he tried to ring Molly. But she hadn't answered his calls. John had finally done it for him. They'd spoken to her together. John had been the one to explain everything, the backgrounds and the fact that her life had been on the line, that Sherlock had saved her. She'd accepted it all with a stony expression, including his apology.

"Fine," she'd said icily. "Let's consider it over and done with."

But it wasn't over. Sherlock was still afraid to go into the morgue. He was sure that Molly had talked to John about him and what had happened. Molly was at John's a lot; she was Rosie's godmother and sat for her. He hadn't seen Molly at all since that difficult conversation. He'd been avoiding her. He hadn't followed John's advice to talk to her again, one on one. There was a lot of advice he hadn't followed. Including Ella's advice to take some time to go back to Musgrave and make peace with all of his memories.

Down in Bart's courtyard, a team of paramedics ran to one of the ambulances. It drove off a moment later. Lights and sirens. Sherlock took a deep breath and let it go. He needed to make a decision at some point. Either he continued on to the morgue, to Molly, and took a look at the murder victim as he'd promised Lestrade; or he turned around and went home. But standing here indecisively at the window out in the hall was senseless.

John. He was meeting him in Regent's Park in a couple of hours. It was strange. To meet up as if they were strangers. Like a timid first date. An attempt at connecting. Odd. He'd never been closer to another person than John. Everything about John was familiar to him. Had been familiar. They'd shared things he'd never shared with anyone before. John was family. Closer than family. But now he was like that brother you grew up with, shared a room and a life with, then drifted away from when you became adults. You each had different concerns, different problems, different experiences no longer in common. You lost touch somehow. And with distance, the amount of not-in-common increased. And then all of the old resentments emerged from that crack that had opened up. Memories that elbowed their way in, taking the place of the time you spent together now. The familiar association with each other, the countless looks, gestures and words, the thousand little signs of affection, all of that replaced by a cold distance where wounds were painful and there was no relief to be had. Deep wounds in need of the healing warmth of the present. The loving present. Just like the one he shared with Eurus. And John? Had he exchanged John for Eurus?

Sherlock's mobile phone vibrated in his pocket. He glanced at the screen. Lestrade. Lestrade, who most certainly wanted to know what he thought of the body, whether he'd discovered anything, drawn any initial conclusions. Sherlock didn't accept the call, instead returning his phone to the inner breast pocket of his jacket. He pushed off the window sill, stretched, and took a couple of deep breaths. Then he set off for the morgue.


	3. Priorities

A kaleidoscope of emotions passed across Molly's face. Then it turned stony. 

"What do you want?" she asked curtly.

Sherlock looked away from Molly, over at the young pathologist who was dissecting a liver with her and currently staring at Sherlock. Then Sherlock sought out Molly's dark eyes, glittering like two polished buttons.

"The body from Ropemaker Street. Lestrade asked me to have a look."

Molly nodded, put down her dissection instruments, took off her Latex gloves, and tossed them into the bin next to the dissecting table. "This way." She walked ahead of him, over to the room where the bodies were stored. "Why are you here alone? Where's John?" she asked as she opened one of the cold chambers and checked the label on the toe of the corpse.

"John's at work in the surgery, I assume."

"You know he's not doing very well?" Molly pulled the drawer out with the body on a slab.

"He says he's getting by."

"He's getting by? And you think that means he's fine? You probably told him you're doing splendidly too, didn't you?"

"I'm fine."

"Yes, of course. You're both doing simply brilliantly. Have the two of you ever NOT lied to each other?" Molly's tone of voice left no doubt that she was upset. She uncovered the body with an angry tug.

"John's never lied to me," Sherlock said softly, taking two exam gloves out of the box Molly held out to him and putting them on.

"But you've lied to him. Just like you lie to everyone. Including yourself."

"Stop it, Molly." Sherlock was startled at how injured his own voice sounded. Molly's accusations hurt. He hadn't lied to John. He simply hadn't given him all the information. He'd never known a complete exchange of information to be a requirement in a relationship. He'd never truly understood that, and he still didn't. No one shared everything. Even Mary had withheld the truth from John and still loved him, even married him and bore his child – a showcase model for a relationship. Why was it so important to reveal that which one believed to be the truth?

"There is no truth," he said as he examined the victim's head. "Truth is nothing more than a subjective variant of perception, a miniscule slice of a complex whole that is impossible to assess without divorcing onself from perspective. In other words, every perspective is both just as true and just as false as any other."

"You still don't get it, do you?"

"No." Sherlock wasn't listening any longer, distracted by the condition of the head wound. It was dreadful. The young man's head had split upon impact. It was completely bashed in on one side, the skull fractured in several places. Sherlock gestured inside the wound. "There are specks of paint here."

"They're from the car the man hit when he fell. His head smashed into the mudguard."

"I presume the fall was the cause of death."

"Ultimately, yes. But the victim had quite a lot of alcohol in his blood. We're examining his liver now."

"He doesn't look like an alcoholic."

"No. The liver also doesn't look as if he were a habitual drinker."

"How high was his blood alcohol?"

"One point eight. Nearly enough to knock him out."

Sherlock lifted the dead man's left hand, which was still more or less in one piece, and examined it. Manicured nails. Professionally done. That matched up with what Lestrade had said. The man had been fully dressed in a business suit and tie when he'd jumped from the highrise. Or fallen. Or been pushed. 

His girlfriend said he must have been pushed. He never would have jumped himself, according to her. His co-worker denied having been up on the roof with him, even though the girlfriend insisted the two of them had stepped away from the party and gone somewhere together. According to her statement, the victim – a businessman named Graham Grainsburgh – had told her he was going to step outside with Sam for a few minutes to get a breath of fresh air and discuss something. Sam had been seen at the party after that, but Graham hadn't. The news of Graham's fatal fall hadn't reached the partygoers until forty-five minutes later.

Boring. Standard attempt at misdirection. Why was Grainsburgh's girlfriend trying so hard to implicate his friend and co-worker, Sam? She must have a motive. And she was mixed up in it. She was the lead to follow. Not Sam.

"Any other substances?" Sherlock asked. "Unusual stomach contents?"

"Not yet," Molly replied, "but we're still working on it. The complete report will be delivered to Greg this afternoon. You can look it over there."

"Signs of a struggle?" Sherlock asked without reacting to the brush-off.

Molly lifted the victim's arm, which had been rather badly mangled, rotated it toward the outside a bit and pointed out the intact section of the upper arm. "Pressure marks here. The haematomas could be from a hand. But the damage is too extensive to pin it down more precisely, much less prove it."

Sherlock took his magnifier out of the kit he always carried with him and peered more closely at the marks on the upper arm. "The haematomas bled all the way down through the tissue; in other words, they were inflicted prior to the time of death," he said.

"About half an hour before," Molly said. "But he also could have bumped into something."

"All right. I've seen enough. Thank you. You can put the body away again." Sherlock tucked away his magnifier while Molly placed the dead man's arm back onto the slab.

Had he really seen enough? Sherlock wasn't sure. He didn't know what he was looking for. He couldn't make heads or tails of the body. He was unable to make any sense of the data points he'd collected. He lacked the mental acuity. He couldn't concentrate. He had a headache. And his thoughts were miles away. Scattered. Scattered by some emotional interference that flashed into his brain from somewhere deep down, flickering through it and making it impossible for him to focus. He needed John. Now. Here. John's professional analysis of the body, his remarks and assumptions – they would be irrelevant and misguided, naturally, but they would help Sherlock get onto the right track. Help him to exclude things, narrow down and pinpoint the facts. Help him draw the right conclusions. John was missing.

"Everything all right, Sherlock?" Molly sounded worried. She'd pushed the drawer back into the chamber and locked it up again already.

"Yes. Yes, everything's fine." Sherlock caught himself standing there, staring off into space. He peeled off the Latex gloves and dropped them into the bin intended for that purpose.

"John's at the end of his rope," Molly said out of the blue.

"I'm seeing him this afternoon," Sherlock replied. He rapidly made his way out of the morgue and decided not to hear Molly's "He loves you, Sherlock."

 

He had heard it, though. And it irritated him. It irritated him immensely that everyone, without exception, was sticking their nose into whatever was happening between himself and John. It wasn't anyone else's business. It irritated him that everyone thought they had to tell him that John loved him. Of course John loved him. There had been plenty of moments during their friendship when that had been made abundantly clear. And it was mutual. Of course it was. How else could they have taken so much from each other and alongside each other. Why did everyone think he and John didn't know that? They were neither naïve nor stupid. They both knew they loved each other. That wasn't the problem. That really wasn't the problem. The problem was that they didn't know how to deal with it.

Sherlock got into a cab and gave the driver the Baker Street address. He'd actually wanted to go to the Yard but he didn't know what purpose that would serve anymore. He didn't want the case. He didn't want to know whether Graham Grainsburgh had been pushed, fallen, or jumped from the roof of the highrise. He wanted to be alone. Alone with his thoughts of John. Alone with his emotions, which were tender and sore. Alone with his exhaustion.

There was a point of difference. A gap between what he and John needed from each other and what they actually did. That gap was painful in and of itself. But what they did to each other because of that pain was downright brutal. Were they punishing each other for not being able to give each other what they needed? Were these attempts to detach from each other? Were there more options than the two that Sherlock saw? Either they overcame that gap or they would have to cut the cord that tore at both of them so painfully yet held them together despite it. Sherlock ruled out the third solution: to learn to live with the pain. He would be destroyed by it and need to let go anyway, and die. It would be better to make a clean break now and let John go free. If he wasn't already in the process of uncoupling himself.

What bitter words to use in relation to love: Break. Pain. Destruction. Death. He'd suspected this was how it was.

 

Sherlock paid the cab driver and got out. He opened the door to 221B and went up the stairs, lost in thought. All of a sudden, he stopped in surprise and sniffed the air. A trace of something spicy had interrupted his train of thought. Just a whiff, a few foreign molecules amidst the familiar miasma of old wood, dust, and the stuff Mrs Hudson used to clean the stairs. Molecules that Sherlock promptly identified, making him snort grouchily. Mycroft. Just what he needed to add to his bad mood.

Mycroft sat in John's chair, legs crossed and fingertips steepled, his expression both expectant and concerned. Sherlock walked past him without a greeting or acknowledgment, went to the window, and threw it open. Muggy summer air and street noise rolled into the living room. He couldn't stand the smell of Mycroft. The understated, acerbic arrogance of his sinfully expensive aftershave. Mycroft raised an eyebrow.

"I don't want you sitting in John's chair," Sherlock snapped at his brother. He was angry. At the fact that Mycroft was waiting for him in his flat, unannounced, but even more at the fact that Mycroft was sitting in the chair he'd had restored for John after the grenade had exploded. It was John's seat.

"Don't be childish, Sherlock. A chair is a chair."

"That's John's chair."

Mycroft sighed. "May I remain seated anyway?" he asked archly. "Or must I stand up and relinquish the seat, despite the fact that there is no John anywhere far and wide who might claim it?"

Sherlock growled. It was childish, he knew that full well. A chair was a chair. And even if it was John's chair: it was unoccupied. Mycroft was right: there was no John in this flat anymore to claim the seat. And yet it enraged him to a truly frightening degree that Mycroft was sitting there. And the way he was sitting: so presumptuous and smug, as if the seat belonged to him now.

Sherlock felt himself shaking inside. He stood by the table at the window and stared at Mycroft sitting in John's chair. And at the same time, he stared helpless and bewildered at his own unbridled fury roiling inside him. Ultrafine bolts of energy that flashed through his neural network, setting off reactions. A strong flight instinct. The urge to free himself. To pick up the empty coffee cup from the desk and smash it in Mycroft's face. Sherlock's hand tingled. But before he could grab the cup, the room flickered before his eyes. He felt faint. Startled, he reached for the back of the chair next to him, gripped it hard, and expelled the air from his lungs in short gasps. His heart was racing. Much too fast. He was breathing as hard as if he'd just run a sprint. He clenched his fingers around the varnished wood, close to panic, felt the weakness in his body and the shaky, uncontrolled energy in his hands.

Mycroft's gaze was critical, his alert eyes resting on Sherlock, observing him.

"You're running on empty, brother mine," he said, the concern in his voice unmistakable. "I don't like it. Are you still in therapy?"

"None of your business. What do you want?"

Mycroft's gaze. Still assessing. Deducing. Then he said, oddly uncertain: "I have a case for you."

"I don't want a case," Sherlock replied gruffly.

"I don't think it's a very good idea either, now that I see the state you're in."

There was a knock at the living room door. Mrs Hudson stood in the doorway holding a tray with tea and biscuits. A surge of wild fury pulsed through Sherlock.

"Leave us alone!" he snapped, just barely able to maintain control. He was shaking all over.

"I'm bringing tea for your brother, Sherlock. He's been waiting for you for quite a while."

"He doesn't want tea."

"Yes, he does. I asked him. Would you like some too? You should at least drink something, Sherlock, evden if you're not eating. That's..."

"Mrs Hudson. Leave us alone. Go away!"

"But..."

"Get out! Now!"

The room froze for a few seconds. Mrs Hudson stood fixed in place in the doorway. Sherlock clung to the chair by the window and struggled to breathe.

Mycroft looked from one to the other, before saying calmly, "Thank you, Mrs Hudson. Just set the tea here. You may then leave us alone." Mycroft indicated the side table next to John's chair.

Mrs Hudson set the tray on the table. Sherlock dug his fingers into the chair and closed his eyes when she began pouring the tea into the cups.

"I'll do that. Leave us alone now," he heard Mycroft say, firmly; used to giving orders.

"I just wanted to..."

"Mrs Hudson!"

"All right, have it your way..." The teapot being put down ungraciously, the brief clatter of the porcelain lid bouncing against the edge of the pot. Mrs Hudson's offended muttering in the stairwell. The door being pulled shut downstairs.

Sherlock tried to breathe calmly, tried to collect himself. He couldn't stand Mrs Hudson any more. He'd shouted at her a few days ago when she'd tried to bring him some apple pie. He'd flipped out at being interrupted in the middle of Brahms' violin sonata. He'd ranted at her and she'd slammed the living room door behind her so hard that a couple of books had fallen off the shelves from the shock wave. Afterwards, he'd been so shaky he hadn't been able to continue playing. His nerves raw, close to a breakdown. He'd taken to locking the door since then. Sometimes he fled into his bedroom and locked that door when he heard her coming.

The grating sound of the spoon Mycroft was using to stir sugar into his tea.

"What's the case about?" Sherlock asked, more to distract himself and his brother than out of any real interest.

"Are you still working with John?"

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"He might be useful. As a soldier and a doctor. A man has disappeared without a trace from a private institution for traumatised members of the military. A patient, Royal Air Force. His father, a brigadier general, asked for my help. His son had been an in-patient there for sixteen months, suffering heavily from the long-term psychological consequences of a tour in Syria."

"What does 'without a trace' mean?"

"Precisely that. He went to his room after lunch one day and hasn't been seen since. He left no clues behind."

"There are always clues," Sherlock retorted peevishly. "Every event leaves an imprint of its occurrence."

"I am aware. But not everyone is able to discern that imprint."

Sherlock took a deep breath and looked down at his hands, still wrapped firmly around the wood of the chair. Behind him, through the open window, the chaos of midday traffic roared. The thought of searching for evidence with John; of investigating, going on the hunt. The look in John's grey eyes, the silent communication. John's reliable strength at his side. The assurance of steadfast loyalty. Sherlock opened his hands then closed them again around the back of the chair, felt the warmth and smoothness of the wood. He felt the floor beneath his feet, felt that his stance was stable once more as he said, soft but steady: "I can't take the case." 

When Mycroft didn't react, he added, "I'm too tired. I need a break."

The traffic outside. Cars. Buses. People. Noise. Heat. Smells. Hustle and bustle. He needed quiet. Quiet and time. Lots of time. Time to think. Time for himself. Time for him and John. He needed to get his priorities in order. Whatever was necessary for survival first. Sherlock closed his eyes again. John. The ground beneath his feet. Everything else was unimportant.

It was quiet in the living room. All he could hear was Mycroft snuffling. Then the porcelain, the cup scraping the saucer as it was lifted. Mycroft drinking, swallowing. The cup being returned to the saucer. The spoon laid alongside it.

"Yes," Mycroft finally said, gently. "I understand."

A long silence. Then the groan of the armchair. Mycroft stood up. Straightened his clothes. After a few seconds had passed without any further action: "I did warn you, Sherlock."

"I know."

"If there's anything I can do for you, you know where to find me."

Seconds dripped into the void. Sherlock didn't open his eyes. He reached blindly for the violin where it lay in the open case on the desk. Mycroft pulled the door shut behind him.


	4. Baghdad

The duck pond was a popular destination for short outings. Little escapes from the daily grind. On summer weekdays like this it attracted a lot of visitors. Mothers with preschoolers burning off excess energy on the nearby playlot. Retirees strolling along the paths. Students reading in the shade of the trees. 

Sherlock looked around for a free bench. He was too early. It wasn't three o'clock yet, but he hadn't been able to stand it in the flat any longer. He wandered along the banks of the pond, taking the same route he had often walked with John. He forced himself to walk slowly, to stop and watch the ducks diving for greenery in the shallow water. He forced himself to look out across the pond, to focus on the patterns the light summer breeze crimped into the water. He forced himself to look at the trees, the shapes they'd grown into, the structure of the leaves, the composition of the bark. The gravel crunched beneath his feet. He tried to listen to it, to feel it. Anything that distracted him was good. Anything that counteracted the untethered fluttering inside him was desirable. Anything he could focus his attention on for a moment or two, that he could hold onto for a few seconds, was welcome.

Sherlock wasn't sure what he hoped for more: that John would come, or that he wouldn't. His desire to see John competed with an unexpected urge to avoid him.

There was a bench free underneath a willow tree. Sherlock went over to it and sat down. He reached into the breast pocket of his suit jacket and took out his mobile phone. No messages from John. It still wasn't three yet.

Sherlock sat back on the bench, leaning against the backrest and trying to get comfortable, to relax. It was pleasant there in the shade. The wind blew in warm, irregular gusts across his face, ruffled through his hair, made the leaves rustle overhead. Sherlock closed his eyes. An afternoon in the park. Children's shouts in the distance. Sparrows twittering. Ducks quacking somewhere close by. The gentle splashing of the water against the rocks on the shore. A dove cooed somewhere. Sherlock decided to stay where he was and wait. John would find him – if he came. He kept the phone in his hand. 

It remained silent. John did come. He came at some point. Sherlock didn't check the time. He didn't open his eyes, didn't look at him. John arrived and sat down next to him. No words spoken. Sherlock felt his weight settling on the bench next to him. He felt the mass of his body, the heat radiating from it. He heard John's breath and smelled his scent, a familiar combination of his shower gel and the disinfectant that was used in the surgery. Sherlock breathed in John's presence, drew it in with every breath, took it in through every pore of his skin, with his entire body. All of his senses were focused on the man next to him. He took a deep breath, let it flow into him, invade him, felt a sense of wonder at how John's mute presence engulfed and relaxed him. All thoughts of flight disappeared, every bit of his inner turmoil silenced. Sherlock sank into a serenity he hadn't experienced in a very long time. A condition of security he wanted to nestle down in, let himself settle into and never leave. He had a sudden need to lean against John, to feel him, to perceive his presence with his body too. To hold him. To be held. To surrender.

Sherlock was shocked at how close he was to simply doing it. Why didn't he? What was he afraid of? It wasn't John's reaction. Because John had allowed Sherlock to hug him, in a moment of emotional weakness. John had not only allowed it, he had collapsed against Sherlock and wept into his chest. Sherlock had caressed him, run his fingers through John's hair and down his back, held him tight. And at some point, John had put his arms around Sherlock and they'd been so close, so incredibly close. He'd felt John's rapid heartbeat against his body, the dampness from his tears against his cheek, which he'd pressed to John's; the strength in John's arms as they held him, the heat between them. His brain had switched off. All he'd known was that John was with him. With him completely. And that it was good. Unbelievably good. Balm to his wounded soul and battered body. He'd only had one thought: that he always wanted to have John that close. His warmth, his strength, his smell. John. Just John.

They'd eaten cake together afterwards, with Molly and Rosie. They'd sat in the café and eaten cake and smiled at each other through reddened eyes. Shy and disbelieving, uncertain about what had happened, about what was happening with them. Like newly-minted lovers who couldn't quite believe their luck.

And then the attempt to salvage that intimacy. John had neglected Rosie for his sake, had followed him unerringly into an unsettling adventure. Eurus. Chaos. Fear. Disorientation. Overload. Too much. Too many demons. Too much left undigested that had welled up and inserted itself between them. Too many fresh emotions. A sister. A daughter. Trauma. Betrayal. Worry. Responsibility. Too many things that had interfered with their new, fragile friendship.

Sherlock slowly turned his head, opened his eyes, and looked at the man sitting beside him on the bench.

John had both arms stretched across the back of the bench, leaning against it, his eyes closed. It looked like he was dozing. His facial features had become harder, Sherlock realised. His cheekbones were visible under his skin, which looked pale and fatigued. The sun filtering through the leaves of the willow tree scattered specks of light in his hair, which was lighter than it used to be. Maybe the first signs of grey in the old, familiar blond. A sobering thought, that the years were draining away: that they were getting old. That they might grow old without each other. The fear that John's child might grow up without knowing who he – Sherlock – was.

Maybe John felt Sherlock's eyes on him, or felt him move. He lazily turned his head and looked at Sherlock. Such breathtakingly beautiful eyes. The grey deep and open. It might have been the intimate stillness of the moment, the dream-like atmosphere. Sherlock gazed into John's eyes and sank. Lost his foothold. John didn't look away. Their eyes stayed locked on each other for a long time. A flow of information. A flood of emotion.

"I want to visit Mary's grave," Sherlock said quietly, his voice thick. He didn't know exactly where the words had come from, nor why he was speaking so quietly.

Surprise registered in John's eyes. "Haven't you ever been?" he asked.

"Once. She gave her life for me. I wanted to thank her. Even if that's utterly ridiculous. I mean, she's dead. She can't hear it anymore. I'm too late." Sherlock's voice faded away. He was horrified to feel tears shoot into his eyes. "I know I don't have the right," he finally whispered with difficulty. "I broke my promise. I wanted to protect her. I would have done anything to protect her. Anything. But she was the one who protected me. And she gave everything to do it. Absolutely everything." Sherlock took a shaky breath. The pain cut off his voice. 

It was quiet for a long time. John had looked away.

"Were you able to say thank you?" John asked then.

"Yes. I talked to her, after a fashion. I mean in my head, of course. A couple of hours."

"A couple of hours..."

"Yes." Sherlock didn't say he'd brought her flowers. For the first time in his life, he'd brought someone flowers. He didn't say that he'd stood at her grave, helpless, and cried. That night had fallen and he'd still been standing there. And that at some point, under cover of darkness, he'd sunk to his knees, hoping to find a sense of closeness and something that might have done justice to the extent of his gratitude and pain. When Big Ben had struck midnight, he'd still been there with her, lost deep in his thoughts. They'd talked. They'd discussed so many things he'd never been able to discuss with a living person. They'd been so close and he'd felt how much he loved her. They'd been so similar. Including in their love for John. Their John. _Save him, Sherlock. Save John._

"I want to go to the cemetery with you," Sherlock said. And when nothing came from John but, just silence, he said, "I'd also like to get to know Rosie. And I'd like to return to Musgrave with you one more time."

"So that's your list of demands," John remarked coolly.

 _It's my list of ways to try to reach you._ Sherlock didn't say that. He said: "I miss you, John."

Silence. Perhaps a startled silence. Helpless. A mute struggle. John had leaned his head back again, his eyes closed, the shadows of the willow leaves dancing across his face. His breaths came rapidly. Sherlock noticed it and averted his gaze. 

"I realise," he said, "that you have a real child now who needs you. You don't need another one like me to take care of as well."

"You're not my child, Sherlock," John said harshly. He sat up straight and looked at Sherlock, a flicker of anger in his grey eyes. "And yes, you're right: I don't need another child. I'm already overwhelmed with one. What I need is a friend who can stand and walk on his own and take on responsibility. And Rosie needs a godfather who takes the role seriously. The game is over, Sherlock. The stakes are too high." John paused. Their gazes fixed on each other. "It's never going to be a game again," John said then, softer, a moment of pain in his eyes.

Sherlock fell silent, stricken. That was what he was afraid of. He'd made a promise and taken on that responsibility. And he'd failed. He hadn't understood what responsibility meant. He'd seen it as a game. A new game with high stakes and exciting rules. He was a master of game-playing. But now there was no game anymore.

They were still looking at each other, John sitting there stiffly, straight as a rod. But his eyes had softened and his voice was warm and filled with sadness when he suddenly said, "I miss you too, Sherlock."

"Tell me what to do," Sherlock said a few moments later, when he'd tried to get a handle on the emotions that John's statement had stirred up.

"I don't know. I just know we can never be the men we once were. Or the men Mary imagined. We're just who we are. I'm an overworked single father who isn't dealing very well with his wife's death, doesn't see any hope for the future, and grieves the past. I can't offer you more than that, Sherlock."

"You're more than that. You know that yourself."

"I'm a doctor. Yes. I know what to do there. A soldier. Give me an objective and I know how to proceed. But as a husband, a father, a friend..."

"It appears we have the same deficits."

"No, Sherlock. You're an incredibly strong, patient brother. Look what Eurus did to you. And yet you care for her with so much love. And you and Mycroft are close, even if you don't want to hear it. You have a family. I don't. I can't even manage to maintain contact with Harry. I cheated on Mary. Now I have Rosie and I'm in over my head. I haven't even really grasped your friendship. Instead of recognising what you were doing, I beat you to a pulp."

"You had good reason to. And it's over with now, John." That wasn't what had hurt the most anyway.

"So much is over with, yet it's still relevant."

"Yes. I know." Those two years. His fake death. Still. John was still throwing it back in his face. It kept returning, over and over. The bulk of John's anger and disappointment. The wound was too deep, too central.

"Shall we walk a bit?" John suggested.

He was still seated, his back straight, but on the edge of the bench now, his muscles tensed for motion, no longer frozen from the inside. Sherlock looked into John's eyes. They reflected openness. Willingness. Kindness. Hope. It would be good to walk together. Beside each other. With each other. Talking was easier when you were on the move. Sherlock stood up. 

"Our old route?" he asked.

John nodded. "Our old route."

 

*

 

John's armchair was empty. Sherlock sat in his, just across from it, and stared at the new upholstery. The same material as before. You couldn't see any difference, other than that the faded spot on the seat and the rubbed-off patches on the armrests were gone. The colours were richer. No signs of use. John had sat there a couple of times but not often. The material still smelled new. Not like John. But things weren't hopeless. No, they weren't hopeless.

Sherlock took a sip from his whisky glass. They'd made a start, he and John. They'd spoken of casual things on their walk. John had talked about Rosie and his practise. Including the fact that he was considering giving it up and taking a position at Bart's again. St Bartholomew's Hospital had their own daycare centre. He could take Rosie with him. Sherlock had listened and seen how difficult John's situation was. Everything he earned went toward paying for his flat, child care, and household help. There was no room for anything else. Sherlock had suggested that he come back to Baker Street. That would save on expenses and make many things easier. But where would they put Rosie? The flat was anything but child-friendly. Even Sherlock could see that.

Too much euphoria? Sherlock contemplated the golden liquid in his glass. He was flying to Sherrinford tomorrow. Eurus. He'd wanted to practise the Brahms violin sonata. It was only written for one violin, but Eurus improvised the second part. A different one every time. He'd intended to practise, but he simply hadn't felt like it. For the first time in weeks, he'd been calm enough to enjoy a drink and poured himself a whisky. 

John. It was John. It was always John. His dependence on John was sobering. It even reached as far as his body. It wasn't healthy. Dangerous. Fatal. Death in Samarra. Sherlock shivered. Mary. 

'I was surprised to see you at the market in Baghdad,' Death said, 'because we had an appointment in Samarra.' 

They'd both seen Death at the market in Baghdad, he and Mary. And Mary had fled. Not to Samarra, but to unforeesable locations, determined on the spur of the moment by a random generator. Unpredictable. And he, Sherlock, had brought Mary back to Baghdad, never suspecting that Death was waiting there this time. Was fate inescapable, incorruptible, no matter how well you played the game or how much you put into it?

Mary was like a missing piece. She'd left John alone with Rosie. And him alone with John.

His phone. Sherlock reached for it. Lestrade. It was almost midnight. He'd turned down the case and didn't want another one. He'd made that more than clear. No more cases for the time being. He needed a rest. Sherlock declined the call. The phone buzzed again a few seconds later. Lestrade wasn't about to give up that easily. Neither was Sherlock. He declined the call again and turned the device to silent mode, set it face-down on the side table. Damn it all! Was it so difficult to understand that he needed some peace and quiet? That he had other priorities at the moment? Sherlock felt himself start to shake inside again. His hand holding the glass was shaking too. That was the end of his peace and quiet. One call, one interruption of his thoughts from an outside source, and his nerves started to misfire.

Should he text John? John had offered him the option. He'd said: "Let me know if you need anything. Or even if you don't need anything." He'd used to do it without a second thought, before. He'd texted John at all hours of the day and night, whenever he'd felt like it. But now? It was late. John was probably asleep already. Tomorrow would be another stressful day, he'd have to get Rosie up early and bring her to the babysitter before he went to the surgery.

Brahms, the violin sonata. Yes, that was a possibility. Because sitting there in the armchair was no longer an option. A thousand butterflies fluttered around inside him, banging into his nerve endings, prickling up and down his body. He needed to do something about the bustling and buzzing and twitching. Play. Brahms. The violin. He could hold onto it, place his hands on the bow and fingerboard and they would know what to do and feel at home. He could lock his eyes onto the notes and his brain would transfer the symbols to his fingers. His ears would glue themselves to the sounds and send corrective impulses. His senses would be focused. His body would align itself, bond with the instrument and the rhythm of the music. That would work. Usually.

Sherlock had no idea how much time had passed. It couldn't have been very much, as he hadn't come to the end of the sonata yet. But someone was pounding on the door. He'd locked it.

"Sherlock! Open the door! Sherlock!"

Mrs Hudson. At this time?

"Sherlock, it's important. Open the door, please!"

The knocking sounded desperate. Strange. Sherlock set down the violin, went to the door, and opened it. Mrs Hudson was standing there in her nightshirt, her hair tousled. She'd already been in bed. In her hands was her mobile phone. She held it out to Sherlock.

"It's Mycroft," she said, completely distraught. "It's urgent. John. It's about John. Sherlock. Please..." Mrs Hudson's voice cracked. Sherlock took the phone out of her hand.

"Mycroft?"

"You'd better come, Sherlock. Immediately. I've sent a taxi. It should be there any moment."

"What's going on?"

"Get dressed. Don't waste time. Take your phone and call me as soon as you're sitting in the taxi. Have you understood?"


	5. The Sea

"Where's Rosie?"

"I don't know, John."

"They gave me a sedative. I can't think clearly. I don't even really know what happened. You have to help me, Sherlock."

"I know. Try to stay calm. Lestrade and his people are at the scene. There's a witness. It will all be fine."

"They have Rosie!"

"We'll find her, John. I promise."

"Promise? You promised to protect her. Her and Mary and me."

"I'm going to do everything in my power."

"Okay. Can you take this thing off me?" John made a jerky motion with his chin toward the strait jacket holding his arms in place against his body. It seemed to be aggravating him no end; he'd been twisting around in it the whole time.

"I don't have the authority. You killed a man with your bare hands, John. And you injured two police officers."

"He's dead? Not good."

"No, not good at all. He could have given us some clues to go on."

"I lost it. I don't even know what I did anymore."

"It will all come out, John. I'm going to get you out of here."

John nodded weakly. He sat on the floor of the padded cell, leaning dully against one wall. On his forehead, he sported a purpled wound that had already been stitched up. His grey eyes were glassy and unfocused. He was obviously having difficulty concentrating. The dimly lit, entirely white room was hazy, not offering any anchor point for the eye and making it difficult to orient oneself even without being pumped full of psychopharmaceuticals.

Sherlock sat next to John on the soft floor. A hulking attendant in a white coat stood at the door. John had gone berserk, swinging his arms wildly and screaming himself into exhaustion. Even after they'd overpowered him, tied him up, and injected him with a sedative. It hadn't ended until Sherlock arrived. But John still seemed uptight and anxious, if more subdued. His eyes were oddly alien. Restless. Full of a resistance borne of desperation.

"Can you ask them to take this thing off, Sherlock? Just for a few minutes so I can stretch my arms? Please. It hurts."

Sherlock looked over at the attendant, who nodded. John was no danger anymore in his sedated state. Sherlock slid closer to him and tugged him in by the shoulders to loosen the ties on his back. John let himself flop forward, let his forehead sink down heavily onto Sherlock's shoulder. He smelled of medicine and some strong detergent or other, mixed with the bitter, acrid scent of sweat and stress. While Sherlock undid the ties on his back, John whispered into his neck, the smouldering energy of a volcano beneath the hot stream of his breath.

"If anything happens to Rosie, Sherlock, or if your sister has anything to do with it, I'll kill you. I swear to you. I will kill you. You first."

"Yes," Sherlock answered quietly. He wasn't even surprised at the fact that he was okay with it. In fact, it seemed to him to be the only logical consequence at the moment. He wasn't afraid of dying at John's hand. It felt right. John would take from him the most important thing, the only thing, and Sherlock would give it to him. Offer it up. The most valuable thing – life itself – final, irreversible. One last, intimate, all-encompassing sacrifice. A shiver of arousal ran through Sherlock's body. John panting into his neck. The diffuse light and muted acoustics of the room fogging his senses. A peculiar dream from which it was impossible to awaken. Sherlock wasn't even sure how real this current experience actually was.

Sherlock released the last tie, pulled the open strait jacket forward, and pushed John back against the wall by his shoulders. He was heavy and bleary.

"Thanks." John freed his arms, stretched, and rubbed his shoulders. His left hand was swollen, the knuckles split. Scrapes and bruises on both arms. His t-shirt speckled with blood, probably from his head wound. His movements were jerky and obviously slowed.

"I can't stay awake any longer, Sherlock. You have to take care of Rosie," he said with effort, reaching out his hand to touch Sherlock's arm. His fingers slid down along it, brushing across the sleeve, over the back of Sherlock's hand, and lingered there, seeking something to hold on to. Sherlock took his friend's hand in his and squeezed it gently.

"Please," John whispered.

"I'll find her," Sherlock promised. "And I'll get you out of here. Just give me some time."

John shook his head. "Just find Rosie. I..." He broke off. His eyes suddenly filled with tears, a heavy cascade that washed down his face. It only took a few seconds before he leaned his head back against the wall and his eyes fell shut. A feeble squeeze of his hand and then it lay slack in Sherlock's. With a deep, shaky breath, John slumped over, asleep.

Sherlock sat there, numb. He couldn't take his eyes off John, the way he lay there so maltreated and fragile, forced into an unwilling, tear-filled sleep, separated from his daughter. Sherlock felt lost and hollow. He'd sworn to protect John's family. He'd sworn it, delirious with a love he'd thought was indestructible and immortal. He'd sworn it from the depths of his soul, knowing that he was willing to die for it. And now? Mary was dead. John had drifted away. Rosie was missing. Nothing was left. Nothing other than a desperate struggle for John. For John's love and what he'd sworn to him.

"Sherlock?"

Mycroft stood in the doorway. He was pale, his expression grim. Sherlock stood up in a daze and went out into the corridor. The attendant locked the rubber room behind him. Locked John up. Inserted layers between them. Sherlock could almost feel it physically. A vague pain in the centre of his chest.

"Are you the contact for Dr John Watson?" asked the woman standing next to Mycroft. She wore a white coat and had a pen in her hand.

"Yes," Sherlock answered.

"Are you a relative?"

"No."

"Does he have any relatives that need to be informed?"

"He doesn't have any family," Sherlock said.

"You're a friend?"

"I'm his partner."

A brief flare of surprise in Mycroft's eyes as his gaze passed over Sherlock. Sherlock didn't care. He needed access to John. Everything else was unimportant.

"Can you prove that somehow?" the woman asked.

"No. We never officially..."

"I can corroborate it," Mycroft said.

"That will suffice for the time being." Then to Sherlock: "I'll need some information from you along with your contact data. I'll need to be able to reach you."

 

*

 

The witness sat in the interrogation room at the Yard, having already made her statement. She'd heard noises down on the street that night and looked out her window only to see three figures overpowering a man and ripping the baby away from him that he'd carried in a kangaroo pack on his chest. The man had been able to hold back one of the kidnappers and delivered a fierce fight. The other two had fled with the child. The woman had called the police straightaway. The police car had arrived right when the one man knocked the other one down, leaving him motionless on the pavement. The two police officers had grabbed the man, still reeling from the fight, and tried to hold him down, but he'd fought back hard, ranted and raved about going after the kidnappers, right now, saying his daughter had been stolen. And that they needed to let Sherlock Holmes know. But the two officers hadn't listened, hadn't seen the kidnapping, just the man lying inert on the ground and the other one who had done it to him. After a few minutes, a second patrol car had arrived, and the four of them had managed to subdue the frenzied man. The paramedics who showed up shortly thereafter reanimated the man lying on the ground and took him away. That was it. The woman hadn't seen anything else. But it was enough to prove that John had acted in self-defense.

"John was so out of control that the police placed him in a psychiatric crisis intervention facility for the time being," Greg Lestrade explained.

"He could have rung me," Sherlock countered. But at the same time, even before Lestrade explained everything, he understood that John had done what he was able to at the moment.

"He didn't have a phone, must have lost it in the struggle," Lestrade said. "He apparently insisted pretty strongly that someone should call you, but no one did. They eventually contacted me when the kidnapper died on the way to hospital, making the charge manslaughter at the moment, amongst other things. I tried to ring you but you wouldn't accept the call."

"So you rang Mycroft."

"What was I supposed to do? There are times when a Holmes is a Holmes."

The generalisation irritated Sherlock, but he promptly dismissed it. He was glad Lestrade had contacted his brother. After all, it was his own fault: he'd rejected the call.

"Do you know anything about the kidnappers?" Sherlock asked, trying to stick to the facts.

Lestrade shook his head regretfully. "They wore masks and the dead man hasn't been identified yet. He's young, 26 at most, athletic, but more likely a runner than a fighter. John did quite a number on him. The perps don't seem to have reckoned with a fight. All we know about the two who got away is that they fled toward the west with Rosie and got into a car one street over. We've sealed off the entire city. They can't get out. But we don't have any good leads. We've also found John's phone but he hasn't received any messages or ransom demands."

Three suspects. On the street at night. What was John doing out on the street with Rosie at night? Or rather: on the narrow access road on the edge of John's neighbourhood. It led to a small park with a fountain.

"I want to see the scene," Sherlock said.

"Forensics are already done with it," Lestrade answered. "But if I know you, you won't care about that."

"No, that really doesn't interest me in the slightest."

 

*

 

Half an hour later, they were there. Lestrade had driven Sherlock and went with him, sharing what he knew here and there and showing him where they'd gathered evidence. The first rays of the sun were breaking over the horizon in the east. The park consisted of an old, massive maple tree surrounded by a small patch of grass, along with a small, burbling Roman fountain about one metre in diameter. The tree and fountain were both probably the remnants of a larger park or former estate grounds. A hydrant stood by the intersection of two paths next to the fountain. One of the paths led from there directly to the next main road to the west, where the kidnappers had got into a car.

The spot was perfect for an assault, despite being in the middle of the city. The houses had lush front gardens filled with greenery, bushes and hedges that obstructed the view. The closest building was a kindergarten, which stood empty at night. The witness's house was across the street. The only one who had seen the incident.

Sherlock examined the surroundings. The day was starting, and street traffic was picking up. Noise was coming from the nearby road to the west, and now and then a private vehicle drove slowly past the fountain, residential commuters making their way over to the western road. It was a six-minute walk to the new residential flats where John lived. Sherlock walked the route slowly, taking everything in. It was a quiet path that led to the back of the property. The main entrance connected to the street to the west. Sherlock followed the footpath along the outside of the building to the entry.

Sherlock always had the key on him. Like some kind of security deposit perhaps. A deposit on love. A souvenir of belonging and friendship. Yes, he had the key to John's flat. But it was from Mary. Not John. Sherlock's heart clenched for a moment. He had to force himself to remain on task. He entered John's flat. Lestrade followed timidly.

The flat smelled stale and unaired, like night and sleep. A half-full wine glass stood on the side table by the couch in the living room. The television remote lay next to it. John had been watching telly and got up in the middle, leaving his half-finished glass. Had Rosie started crying, calling for him?

Rosie's room was still dark. Sherlock rolled up the blinds. Daylight illuminated the rumpled cot. The top cover was turned back. John had picked Rosie up out of bed. Sherlock went into the kitchen. A baby bottle stood there with the dregs of some baby formula in it. Had John fed Rosie? And then gone out with her? Why?

Sherlock went into the bedroom. A double bed. Two pillows – still – and a large double comforter. The bed was untouched.

"What are we looking for here?" Lestrade asked.

"Clues," Sherlock answered as he pulled open the door to the wardrobe. John's clothes. And Mary's clothes. Still. John hadn't removed Mary from his daily existence yet. Except in the bathroom. The bathroom only contained John's things and the various items necessary for the care of an infant.

"Wouldn't it be more efficient to just ask John what he was doing before he went out with Rosie?" Lestrade asked. His voice indicated how uneasy he was about the whole situation.

Sherlock paused. Lestrade was right. What was he doing here? He didn't know himself anymore why he was snooping around John's flat. It smelled of John and the child. Was he looking for John? For John and the life he no longer shared with Sherlock? He wasn't focusing on Rosie here. It was difficult for him to fully comprehend that she had been kidnapped. She didn't occupy a space in his field of perception anymore. When Mary died, he'd somehow lost the child too, lost sight of her. John often handed Rosie off to others. He'd barely seen her. Not even at the beginning, when he and John had tried working together again. Rosie had disappeared from his life.

"I'll ask John as soon as he's coherent," Sherlock said. "But first I have to go back to Baker Street. Can you drive me?"

"What, now?"

"Yes, now."

"All right."

 

*

 

A massive steel door. A man trap to assure single-person access. Beyond that the second of three checkpoints. The security people here knew him already, knew the bag contained his violin case and that the violin was in the case. Nothing else. No weapons, no drugs, no communication devices. Sherlock passed the bag through the opening in the bullet-proof panel, where one of the security officers took it and unpacked it under Sherlock's watchful eye while a second one kept an eye on the visitor. It was the same every time. Then the body scan. Sherlock had never had anything suspicious on him, but he went through the procedure every time, unresisting. He avoided doing anything that might have caused problems, and understood – after everything that had happened – that they kept a tight control over anyone going in or out of here.

A long, dismal corridor, followed by the lift down to the dungeons. Downstairs the next man trap. The officer on duty recognised Sherlock and opened the first steel door. Sherlock waited patiently those few seconds until the scan inside the cubicle was finished and the second steel door opened. A right turn in the next corridor, then up the stairs and straight on to the wing where his sister was housed. Sherlock knew the way by heart.

Eurus stood in the middle of her cell, her back to the glass partition, playing her violin. She didn't react when Sherlock entered. Sherlock didn't recognise the piece she was playing. It sounded wild and strange. Restless, chasing motifs that suddenly stopped on an unexpected note for a breathless moment, only to continue the chase, then stop, chase, and finally, in an abrupt turnabout, resolve into a startlingly familiar classical cadence, only to begin the chase anew after a brief pause for breath. Sherlock listened, fascinated. He couldn't place the music. Either Eurus was improvising or she was practising one of her own compositions. She composed without writing anything down. She composed in her head, then practised and played from memory.

Sherlock set down his bag and unpacked his violin. He took a couple of steps closer to the glass wall and placed himself in the spotlight that had turned on automatically when he entered, before starting to tune his instrument. Eurus must have sensed her brother was there a while ago. But she simply kept playing. Sherlock tuned his violin and waited. Eurus kept playing without acknowledging him.

Sherlock waited. Eurus's music got faster and wilder, then stopped abruptly. She turned around. A searching look from her piercing blue eyes bored into Sherlock's. Sherlock wedged his violin under his chin, set the bow to the strings, and started the Brahms sonata. Eurus's probing gaze irritated him. At the same time, he was aware that she already knew. That she knew he wasn't just here to play music this time. Eurus didn't move a single millimetre, just stood there with the violin in her left hand and the bow in her right, observing Sherlock. 

He played the first movement, trying not to get distracted. Were Eurus's thoughts invading his? Did she see or hear his uncertainty, his intention? Sherlock forced himself to concentrate on the music, not to pay attention to Eurus. Simply to play. He closed his eyes, listened closely to the tones, the phrasing, focused on the intonation, the vibrations, just as he did when he played when he was at ease.

When he opened his eyes again and set down the violin, the first movement over, Eurus stood directly in front of him, right behind the glass. Something flashed behind her blue eyes as she said:

"Ask it."

Sherlock was shocked that his sister was speaking. She hadn't said a single word to him since they'd started playing together.

"Ask what?" he said.

"Ask what you want to ask."

So she knew. She knew about Rosie. Or at least she knew that's why he was here.

"Did you have anything to do with it?" Sherlock asked.

"With what?"

Sherlock examined the blue eyes in front of him, but they were impenetrable.

"John's daughter has been abducted. Are you behind it?"

Eurus didn't answer right away, instead returning Sherlock's gaze, amused. An undecipherable smile played around her mouth as she replied:

"John is the sea."

"Excuse me?"

"When did the path you walk become a river with only one direction? That's what you're asking yourself, isn't it? And you also know that every river ends in the sea."

"John is the sea..." Sherlock echoed, baffled. Yes, he knew it. Somewhere deep down, he knew it. But the statement itself, the way it was put, got through to him in an unexpected direct line to his core, releasing a flood of associations. The sea. Vast. Deep. Rhythms. Peace. Storms. Sinking. Diving. Underwater world. Disorientation, complete suspension.

"Womb," Eurus added.

Sherlock tried to free himself from the flood of emotions, not knowing whether it was his sister who was transmitting them to him.

"Did you have anything to do with Rosie's abduction?" he asked harshly.

"No," Eurus said. "No, I had nothing to do with it." A long, intense look. Sherlock allowed it, allowed Eurus to scan him. "Give me the pictures and facts. I'll solve the case for you," she then said.

"I swore to protect her," Sherlock said.

"So do it."

Eurus took a step back, away from the glass, lifted her violin, and started to play. Bach, double concerto in D minor, opus 1043. _Largo ma non tanto_. Sherlock joined in haltingly with the second part after a few measures.


	6. The Decision

Sherlock waited outside the prison gates. Mycroft had arranged for the Crown prosecution's petition for remand to be rejected. John had to stay in contact, but he could move about freely. He was being released. He'd only spent a couple of hours in custody.

John was pale, his gait lethargic, when he came through the gates toward Sherlock. They'd seen each other all morning during the interrogation at the Yard. Yet a deep sense of relief and profound emotion washed through Sherlock as John came closer. The first step had been taken. A small but important step: John was free. For the time being. Sherlock attributed it to his generally weakened state that he had to force himself not to hug John as soon as he was standing silently in front of him, his grey eyes tired, grateful, and questioning all at the same time.

The taxi driver opened the door for them, and they got in.

"Any news?" John asked once they were on the road.

"Yes. We've identified the dead man. Phil Heskett. Does the name mean anything to you?"

"Phil Heskett? No. Never heard of him."

"He has prior arrests for drug offenses and unlawful entry. Lived in Peckham. I suggest we go over there."

"I need a shower and a change of clothes first, Sherlock."

"Of course. First a shower and fresh clothes. We also have the car the kidnappers escaped in, by the way."

"Let me guess: stolen."

"No. Hired from a car rental agency by an older gentleman under a false name. Returned on time, paid in cash."

"So not a very helpful lead."

"Not really. Except the fact that we now need to assume everything was planned out in detail. It must be someone who knew you would be going out again with Rosie that night."

"I don't take her out every night. Only when she won't stop crying and won't sleep. I don't do it regularly. Once or twice a week at most."

"They might have been watching you. But they hired the car at 4 pm. How could they know you'd go out with Rosie that evening at 10?"

"I don't know, Sherlock." John's voice sounded exhausted and pained.

Sherlock turned his head to take a look at John, as he sat there on the back seat of the car, gazing out at the afternoon traffic. John's posture was tense. He was restless. His concern for his child must have been eating him up. Just as Sherlock's concern for John was eating Sherlock up. There still hadn't been any contact from potential blackmailers. At least Lestrade assumed the motive was blackmail. Sherlock wasn't so sure. What would they have been able to gain through the child? Was this about him, about Sherlock? Was John having to suffer on his account once more? Was this one of Eurus's new games? Sherlock was well aware that Eurus would have no scruples about using him if she wanted something. Did she want to separate Sherlock from John? Was she jealous, the way she'd been jealous of Victor? She knew what John meant to him. Did she accept that? Did she want to destroy it? Was she playing with it?

The flat still smelled stuffy when they got there. John opened the living room window first before going to Rosie's room.

"Someone's been here," he said, alarmed. "The blinds were down when I left."

"That was me," Sherlock said. He'd followed John and now stood in the doorway of the nursery.

"You? How did you get in?"

"Mary gave me a key." Sherlock dug it out and presented it to John. "Here."

John stared at the key in Sherlock's hand. "What am I supposed to do with that?"

"Maybe you don't want me to..."

"Stop it, Sherlock! If Mary wanted you to have it, it's okay with me. Keep it. I should have thought of it myself. I'm sorry. I had so many doubts."

John took a deep breath but stayed where he was, one hand leaning on the railing of the cot, his eyes cast downward for a long moment. Then he lifted them, and in them was a resolve that unsettled Sherlock. A firework of emotions flashed through the anthracite of John's eyes, and still he maintained eye contact. The strength of a soldier who knows that it's come down to all or nothing.

"Ella said I should tell you," John said, and Sherlock felt a wave of panic rise in him.

Ella. Ella got right to the heart of things. Always. What did John want to tell him? Why now? Sherlock leaned his shoulder against the door frame. He was afraid of what was coming. Because whatever it was, it was the truth, and it was going to hit him hard. He could see it in John. In his eyes.

"It's like this: I'm not doing very well without you, Sherlock," John said, surprisingly matter-of-fact. "In fact I'm doing pretty poorly in everything. I can't handle things. I need you. Not just now, to find Rosie. Mary was right, you know. You're the only one who can save me." After a couple of heartbeats, he added – and it was clear from his tone how difficult it was for him to say these words – "You broke my heart in a lot of ways. And you can still break it. That scares me."

Sherlock felt dismay and helplessness rush through him like a wave of physical weakness. He leaned hard against the door frame and tried to breathe. Tried to remain standing. Tried to accept what John had said. To hear it and understand it. Fully. Not just with his head. He tried to look at John as he did so. To meet John's eyes and allow him to see Sherlock's naked emotions. And his fear of them.

John swallowed, cleared his throat and then said, his voice thick, "I'm going to have a shower. I'll be ready in ten minutes."

"John." Sherlock held his friend by the arm when John passed by on his way out of the room. John stopped, standing very close to him. "Thank you," Sherlock whispered.

John nodded soberly. He didn't say anything, just let his fingers brush the back of Sherlock's hand before Sherlock let go of his arm, and John went off to shower.

Sherlock stayed there in the doorway, virtually paralysed. He had to find Rosie. He had to start thinking. He knew that, but there was no clear line in his head that he might have followed. He didn't even know where to look. Not to mention what he might be able to do. The scale of his disorientation was monstrous. Unacceptable. Dangerous. He knew that. He couldn't allow himself to be confused by what John said to him. John was fighting for ground with Ella, just as Sherlock was. That was important, but not now. Not now. Now he needed to find Rosie. He couldn't break John's heart again. He had to find Rosie. For John.

Sherlock pushed off from the door frame and went back to the living room. He needed to get a clear head. Three masked abductors who were in place with a hired escape vehicle precisely when John went out again with Rosie. How had the kidnappers got their information, and what was the motive behind it? Pedophilia? No, Rosie was too little and no one would involve additional parties in something like that. Human trafficking? The lengths the culprits had gone to were too great for that as well. There were easier ways to get small children. So it wasn't just any child they had been after, but Rosie Watson. Blackmail after all?

Sherlock froze. Through the open kitchen door, his eyes fell on the baby bottle with the remains of the formula. Food. It would have been possible to put something in the baby's food to make her cranky, even in pain, something that would prevent her falling asleep at any rate.

Sherlock went into the kitchen, pulled the nipple out of the bottle, sniffed it, and grimaced in disgust. He dribbled some of the whitish liquid onto his hand and tasted it anyway. A sweet milk-grain concoction. Made from a powder mix. Sherlock opened the kitchen cupboards, searching for the powder, and quickly found the container. It was almost empty. Sherlock scanned the ingredients listed on the package. Nothing that would have induced sleeplessness. Still. He shook some of the powder into a plastic baggie and put it into his pocket. It would need to be taken to the lab.

"John?" Sherlock knocked on the bathroom door. The shower wasn't running anymore.

"Yeah?"

"Does Rosie always have trouble sleeping when you give her this formula?"

John opened the door. He stood there with the towel around his hips, his hair wet. A cloud of aromatic dampness billowed out toward Sherlock.

"No. I give her some of that formula watered down when she can't sleep. She's sometimes still hungry at night. She usually sleeps after the formula. But sometimes she doesn't." John ran a comb through his hair then walked out of the bathroom and went into the bedroom. Sherlock followed him.

"What did she have for dinner the night of the abduction?" he asked.

"She ate at the creche."

"Not at her babysitter's?"

"No. She's in the creche on Wednesdays. Could I maybe get dressed now?"

"Yes, of course." The door closed in Sherlock's face. "Does she always or usually have problems sleeping on Wednesdays?" Sherlock asked through the closed door.

"No. There's no pattern. Depends on what she's done or eaten that day. Or how my mood's been. She must sense when I'm... No. Wait." John opened the bedroom door. He was already dressed and buttoning up his shirt. His eyes were wide in alarm. "The last two weeks it was always on Wednesday."

"Have there been any staffing changes at the creche?"

John's grey eyes registered surprise. "I don't know, Sherlock. There are always different carers there. I don't know all of them."

"Let's go."

"To the creche?"

"Yes, first to the creche."

 

*

 

Of course it was a fake name. The temp had been planned for three weeks but hadn't shown up for work on Thursday – two days before the scheduled end of her assignment. Lestrade's people had tried to make a sketch based on the descriptions from the other carers, but it hadn't panned out. Apparently, no one had really got a good look at the young woman, who had posed as a university student. One thing was for certain, though: she'd taken care of Rosie. Lovingly, as the creche director emphasised. And for all the children, not just Rosie, who unfortunately only came on Wednesdays. Rosie took an instant liking to the young woman and had enjoyed being fed by her. No, they didn't always have the same thing on Wednesdays. And at ten months old, Rosie had been able to eat quite a lot herself and liked snacking on the organic finger foods that were available: pieces of vegetable, fruit, and cheese. At that age, children liked to eat with their hands and choose their own food, she said. The creche tried to accommodate that. On Wednesday, dinner had consisted of whole-grain bread, yogurt, cucumber, and grated carrots with hazelnuts. Dessert had been banana slices. 

Sherlock handed the statement back to Lestrade and looked at John. He knew so little; really absolutely nothing about children. Did John know any more? Did he know what a ten-month-old child was supposed to eat, and what they shouldn't eat? Or did he leave it to the professionals in whose care he left Rosie?

Those were the wrong kinds of thoughts. He needed to think about the case. Not about John. About Rosie and the kidnapping. At least they now had an initial suspicion.

"The woman gave Rosie something that didn't agree with her," Sherlock summarised. "We can be almost entirely certain of that. As well as the fact that she did it intentionally. Twice – first a trial run, then the main event. Rosie couldn't sleep because of it, despite John's formula, and he took her out for some fresh air. The whole thing was planned at least three weeks in advance. Probably longer, because I assume the temp was put in place for the purpose. So the motive must be related to something that happened several weeks ago. But what is that motive? Why John's daughter?"

Lestrade gave him a look. "You don't know, do you?"

"No. What?"

"It's John's daughter because you're Sherlock Holmes and he's your friend and partner."

"No," Sherlock said harshly. "And if it is the case, I'm going to ensure it's the last time."

The reaction in John's eyes. John knew what he meant. Sherlock could tell by the brief flash of disbelief, followed by the brittle reflection shutting down any further access to him. It wasn't the first time. He'd tried more than once to leave John in order to protect him. This time would have to be for good. He would have to break John's heart one more time. One final time.

Lestrade laid out a mobile phone, a gun, and several pieces of paper on the table in front of John and Sherlock.

"We found these in the dead man's flat." Lestrade pushed another piece of paper toward Sherlock. "This is the list of contacts from his computer and phone. We've gone through everything. He called the same number several times in the period before the attack. The number isn't registered. We haven't found out who it belongs to."

"Did you try calling the number?" John asked.

"Not yet. We assume the accomplices who got away don't know yet that the third man's dead. Nothing's leaked to the press and it looks like the deceased lived alone. We went in quietly when we searched his flat. We didn't need to break in since he had the key on him. We also didn't seal it up afterwards so the neighbours don't get alarmed. We assume the other kidnappers will try to contact him at some point."

"That hasn't happened yet?"

"No. Nothing's come in on his phone and no one's gone by his place as far as we can tell."

"Is the building being watched?"

"Yeah, I've got a man down there."

"Good." Sherlock was satisfied. He slid the list of contacts over to John. "Do you know any of these names or numbers, John? Maybe it has something to do with you or Mary."

John read through the list and shook his head. "No."

"It's been almost twenty-four hours, no contact has been made by any blackmailers, and we have no sign of the kid," Lestrade pointed out. The concern was clear in his voice. "I'm going to initiate a large-scale search for Rosie Watson."

"No. That will just alarm the kidnappers, make them nervous and needlessly endanger the child. Wait a bit," Sherlock said.

"What for?"

"I'm going to find Rosie. I'll activate my homeless network."

Lestrade slowly shook his head, his lips pressed together. He met Sherlock's eye resolutely as he said, "I never want to have to regret that I didn't do everything, and I mean absolutely everything, to save a child's life."

"She's alive," Sherlock said testily.

"How do you know that?"

"It makes zero sense to plan such an elaborate kidnapping for Rosie Watson, only to kill her. If the point had been to kill her, they could have done it much more easily."

"We don't know what the motive is," Lestrade shot back darkly.

"Give me tonight and tomorrow. Let your people keep working on it, and prepare the search. But don't launch it until tomorrow noon, if I haven't brought in any results by then," Sherlock proposed.

"We'll be losing valuable hours."

"We'll be GAINING valuable hours," Sherlock corrected him.

Greg Lestrade was leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed over his body. He gave Sherlock a searching look, seemingly undecided. After considering for a while, he turned to John.

"John?"

"Me? I'm supposed to decide? YOU'RE the experts."

"It concerns your daughter," Lestrade said calmly.

John took a deep breath, then let it out in a heavy stream. He looked at his hands for a long time where he had them folded on the table in front of him. Then he sought out Sherlock's eyes.

Sherlock remained silent, allowing the attentive grey eyes to examine him. John had doubts. Sherlock saw them. He saw the battle John was fighting. He saw his friend the soldier on one side. And he saw the terrible fear of a father for his small daughter. He saw all of the emotions and arguments struggling against each other.

John looked away, back to Lestrade. Lowered his eyes again and stared at his hands on the table in front of him. He was breathing hard. He still seemed to be struggling with the decision. Then he took a deep breath, sat up straight, and looked into Sherlock's eyes. A long time. Information flowed between them. Fear and pain. Excruciating fear and leaden pain. A burning love. That burned deep enough to wound. And grief. A heavy, deeply rooted grief. 

Sherlock swallowed hard. A stony lump formed in his stomach. His chest filled with a hot mass that cut off his air. He knew what John was going to say even before he turned to Lestrade and spoke the words:

"Start the search."


	7. Imago

A strip of light slid diagonally over the whitewashed living room ceiling whenever a car drove past on the street outside. That happened frequently, even now, just past midnight. Sherlock lay awake and watched it, aware of the irrelevance of what he was observing. A commonplace light effect that had been occurring as long as the flat had existed, most likely. Mary must have seen it too. It kept repeating itself, probably for the thousandth time. 

Sherlock closed his eyes. He was exhausted, hadn't slept in almost forty hours. He needed sleep urgently. At least a catnap for a couple of hours. To regain his strength. The couch was comfortable. John had given him a pillow and a blanket. Had asked him to stay. Of course he stayed. Of course he forgave John for deciding to start the search, even if he'd felt rejected and abandoned at first. He understood John's motivation. Still, it made him feel hollow and helpless, as if something had broken loose from inside him. He lay there watching the light effects on the living room ceiling in order not to have to look at the emptiness within him.

He'd activated the homeless network. The people out there would search on his behalf. There were a lot of them, and they had eyes everywhere. All over the city. And Rosie was still within the city limits. All of the streets leading out were still being watched. Especially with the official search underway now. He'd leave at six. He hoped John would be asleep. 

John was restless. Sherlock heard him get up and go into the bathroom, then shuffle through the living room to the kitchen. The tap. John drank some water then went back to the bedroom. Sherlock pretended to be asleep when he passed the couch.

He'd decided not to tell John that he was going to fly to Sherrinford first thing in the morning. John would want to know why, and he'd want to come along. But Sherlock didn't know whether that might put him in danger or not. Anyway, it was better for John to assist the Yard during the search and be ready in case anything came in. Aside from that, John wasn't allowed to leave the city as long as he was under investigation for manslaughter. Mycroft had confirmed the flight for Sherlock and notified Sherrinford of his impending visit. He just had to wait until morning. There was nothing for him to do until then. Just lie here and wait. And sleep, if that was even possible.

"You're not sleeping, are you?"

Sherlock opened his eyes. John stood in front of him, there in the darkened living room. Tousled and in a pair of wrinkled pajamas. Sherlock sat up.

"No, I can't sleep," he admitted.

"Can I sit here for a mo'? Not long."

Sherlock shifted over wordlessly. John lowered himself to the couch beside him. He smelled warm and familiar. The olfactory components that were missing from Baker Street. Sherlock caught himself inhaling them greedily. Memories and a sense of satiation. John was being lax with his personal space. He sat close. Almost touching.

"It wasn't against you, all that with the search," John began. "I wanted to make sure you knew that. It's not that I don't trust you. I'm just so scared for Rosie."

"It's fine, John. I'm not insulted."

"Good."

They were quiet for a while. Cars drove past outside. Strips of light slid across the ceiling. 

"There's something else," John eventually said. "I threatened to kill you last night. I apologise for that. I was under the influence of drugs; desperate and angry. I was out of my mind. Out of control."

"If we're going to start apologising for everything we've ever done to each other, we'll still be sitting here tomorrow night," Sherlock said. "Especially once I start on my list."

Their eyes met. Sherlock smiled cautiously. John smiled back, his eyes black and gleaming in the dusky darkness of the late-night space.

"I just want things to be good between us again," John said quietly. "Because they're not right now, are they?"

"No."

"There are still things I can't forgive you for. I'd like to talk to you about them eventually. Eventually. Really talk, you know? Honestly."

"Let's find Rosie first. I hope we'll have enough peace and quiet, and time, to talk about everything afterwards."

John nodded absently. He'd slouched down against Sherlock's shoulder as they talked, leaning on him lightly. Sherlock didn't know whether John was aware of it. It seemed to have happened more unconsciously than intentionally.

John said, "Ella suggested we could also go talk to her together."

"She told me that too."

"Maybe we should. I can't do it by myself. Talk. Say the right things."

"Yes, maybe we should."

Strips of light slid diagonally across the room. Neither of them spoke. Sherlock closed his eyes, breathed in the familiar man leaning against his shoulder. A junction that generated warmth and a sense of peace. Of relief that allowed room for fatigue. And desire.

John took a deep breath, stretched, and stood up.

"Thanks, Sherlock," he said softly. "I'm going to try to sleep a bit now."

"Yes, I will too. Good night, John."

"Good night."

 

*

 

Eurus stood in the middle of her cell with her back to the glass. The violin dangled toward the floor in her left hand, the bow in her right. She'd stopped playing when Sherlock entered the room and triggered the light.

Sherlock stopped behind the warning line in front of the glass. He didn't feel right. He felt naked without his violin, without an instrument to wedge under his chin and justify his presence. He felt defenseless without the bow to allow him to move his right hand to cover his solar plexus and protect the area around his heart, to redirect his breathing into the music. He felt helpless without the instrument that had become his channel of communication to Eurus.

Sherlock waited. His sister had already registered his presence. But she took her time, made him wait. Was probably scanning him. It wasn't until several long seconds had passed that she went to her bed, laid the violin in its case, loosened the bow, and placed it alongside. No rush. Only once she'd done that did she turn around and approach the glass – lazy, provocatively slow.

Sherlock met his sister's blue eyes, which rested on him attentively. He couldn't read what was going on behind the blue. But he could see there was a lot. 

Then Eurus spoke, with something like satisfaction in her voice: "You want me to find Rosie."

Sherlock was taken aback by the directness of her statement, and needed a moment to decide on the right response.

"I'm here because I need your help to find her," he finally said. "I don't want you to solve the case. But I need someone to help me think."

"To help you think?"

"A conversation about Rosie Watson's abduction. An exchange of ideas. Possible motives, possible culprits. Clues. I need your help with thinking and deducing."

Eurus looked him over sceptically. And was that amusement on her face?

"You can't find John's daughter," she declared.

"No. That's why I'm here."

"You're emotionally compromised. It's interfering with your thinking. And your desire is unfulfilled. That's also getting in your way. It's dragging you down to the dungeon of subconscious fears."

"It is what it is," Sherlock said. He was willing to accept his sister's declarations. He was willing to come clean, if that's what it took to find Rosie. He was willing to pay any price.

"The dungeon of subconscious fears," Eurus repeated thoughtfully. "Victor's down there. Did you know that? Victor is now John, and he's still down there."

"I'm working on it," Sherlock said simply.

"You're seeing a therapist."

"Yes."

Eurus's eyes searched Sherlock's. Sherlock let her. It was his vulnerable spot; he knew that. Eurus knew it too. She'd murdered his first crush and seen what it had made him: a man who was incapable of entering into relationships, with a panicky fear of emotions, only able to survive behind a cold mask of cynicism and superiority. Cracks had formed in that mask due to John. Mary's death had shattered it. Eurus had swept the remnants off his face. The man beneath it was still tender and inexperienced. Like the imago of a butterfly when it had worked its way out of its chrysalis and spread its wings for the first time, still shaky and unable to fly.

Eurus lowered her gaze. She turned around and walked away from the glass, into the main part of her cell, and stood with her back to Sherlock.

Sherlock didn't know what had happened, what she had seen. Could she not stomach his weakness? Sherlock didn't believe that she felt guilt. Eurus's brain didn't function like a normal brain. Her mental powers overruled her life and her emotional development. Her emotions were at the level of a narcissistic child. He was her little brother who paid attention to her and played with her. They made music together. Music connected them. Connected them on a level that was unattainable by any other means. Made peace and created common ground between them.

Sherlock flinched as he realised the risk he was taking. He'd altered the channel of communication. How would Eurus react to that? How would she deal with his need for help? Like a big sister who protects and helps her little brother? Or like a big sister who lords her power over him with sadistic glee? Was Eurus weighing up which one would bring her more? To keep her musical playmate or to play a different game at his expense?

"Marsden, 93 Haldane Road, Fulham," Eurus said into the stillness, loud and clear, without turning around. "You can pick Rosie up there."

Sherlock froze. It was deathly silent for several heartbeats. He tried to take slow, deep breaths. Then he said, "You solved the case. Or else you're involved."

Eurus turned around. Her expression was serious. "I solved the case," she said reproachfully. "But I want something in return."

"What?"

"Well." Eurus returned to the plate glass. Something flickered behind the blue in her eyes that sent a cold shiver down Sherlock's spine. "In the end, isn't everything we do a trade? We trade materials for other materials, information for a favour, a favour for sex, sex for love, love for a life."

"Tell me what you want for the information."

"Not for the information," Eurus said. "For Rosie."

"Then what?" Sherlock asked. And at the same time, he wondered whether he was making the greatest mistake of his life by agreeing to it. "Rosie for what?"

"For _whom_. A person for a person."

"For whom?"

"What's the value of a Watson? Or rather, for two Watsons, because you'll be getting John into the bargain. A two-for-one deal, if you will."

No. No! Sherlock shook his head vehemently. "No, Eurus. I'm not willing to play those kinds of games. Not for John. And not for the child."

"The game's already been played, Sherlock. The case is solved and you have the information. All that's left is to decide on the price. But I'll be fair: the little Watson for a Holmes."

Sherlock stared into his sister's eyes, horrified.

"For which Holmes?" he asked tonelessly.

"Make a suggestion. You have five to choose from."

No! Not that! Sherlock took a couple of steps back from the window, turned around, ran both hands over his face, tried to regroup. Damn it! What had he done? He didn't want a new game. No more. Never again! He needed to get out. Now. He needed to think. Think! He only had one, just one Holmes he could offer. Only one. Always the same one. Sherlock turned around.

"All right," he said. "Sherlock. I offer you Sherlock Holmes for Rosie Watson."

Eurus's gaze was assessing. Was that a smile? Or mockery? She didn't speak. Not for a long time. Sherlock withstood her gaze. He wanted her to see he was serious. He didn't know what she meant by a trade, what she wanted from him in exchange. He was aware of the fact that his death would be a price that was easily paid. He guessed that Eurus wanted something else, though. Perhaps tedious, difficult, painful commitments. That was fine too. With one exception. 

"I belong to you. But I won't commit any crimes and I won't kill for you. Except myself, if that's what you want."

Eurus's eyes were still searching his. She nodded slowly. 

"Good," she said calmly. "I've made note of your suggestion. 93 Haldane Road, Fulham. The name is Arthur Marsden. I'll see you again in two days. I've composed a second part to the Brahms concerto. You're going to like it."

Eurus turned away and went over to her bed, picked up the violin bow, tightened it, took the violin out of its case, and placed it under her chin.

 

*

 

A brick wall. Two metres high. Sherlock couldn't see the number of the house behind it. But the GPS system on his phone indicated this was number 93. The metal door, painted grey, was locked. No nameplate, no mailbox. A crooked doorbell affixed to the door frame on the left, the cable leading up over the wall. Sherlock pushed it.

"Who's there?" a woman's voice called, apparently from a window of the house behind the wall.

"Courier service. I have a letter for Arthur Marsden."

"He's not here."

"Can I deliver the letter?"

"Come back later."

"When will Marsden be back?"

"No idea."

The window was closed and locked. Sherlock rang again. He heard the bell jangling somewhere inside the house, but no one reacted to it this time.

Fine. There must be another way into Arthur Marsden's flat. Sherlock walked along the brick wall. Another house behind it, another door, this time wood. It was locked as well. The next house. Another door. The same thing. The wall turned a right angle a few metres further on. A narrow footpath ran parallel to it, on the opposite side a wooden fence, no spaces between the slats, likewise a good two metres high. Sherlock walked along the wall, which went all the way through. 

Then came the street. An ironmonger on the corner. There was a gap in the wall there, a wrought iron gate leading into a small inner courtyard filled with scrap metal. Someone was welding metal in an open-air workspace. The man wore a welding mask and was focused on the piece he was bent over working on. The gas flame hissed. Sparks flew around. Sherlock walked past him unnoticed into a back garden. A whole row of little back gardens that had apparently been built in the protected space between the two rows of old, back-to-back brick houses. Sherlock climbed over fences, through vegetable patches, and under closely packed clotheslines.

Number 93 was one of the narrow brick row houses. Here, from the back, the haphazard architecture became apparent of the various extensions that had been erected more or less without any master plan. The back door wasn't locked. The ground floor housed an old-fashioned kitchen, dining room, and bathroom. Sherlock went up the dark wooden stairs. The upper floor consisted of two rooms. One was a nursery. A baby cot. Changing table. Toys. Photographs on the wall. A beaming mother with a newborn infant. A baby crawling on a sheepskin. The mother with the baby in her arms, both smiling at the camera. Sherlock opened the cupboard. Clothes for a baby girl. Rosie? Was that Rosie in the pictures? No, it couldn't be. Rosie had always been with John and Mary. Damn it! He hadn't seen Rosie in so long, he didn't even know what she looked like now.

Were those voices? Sherlock listened out into the hall. The same woman's voice from before.

"Hallo, Mrs Beatty! There was a deliveryman here with a letter for your brother."

"Did you take it?"

"No. He'll come back later."

"All right. Let me get Valerie settled first. I'm afraid she needs a bath and a fresh nappy."

Steps. The door downstairs, opening and closing. The woman was talking to the child, apparently taking it into the bathroom. Sherlock heard water running and carefully snuck down the stairs. The door to the bathroom stood open. The water was still running. The woman was speaking softly to the child. Sherlock slipped past to the house door, opened it, knocking at the same time, and called, "Hello, Mrs Beatty?"

The water immediately stopped splashing.

"Who is it?"

"A friend of your brother's. I apologise. I knocked, but you must not have heard it."

"Hold on." Several seconds passed, then a woman came out of the bathroom, a toddler wrapped in a towel in her arms. "What do you want?" she asked.

Sherlock looked the child over. Was it Rosie? Her eyes. Was she looking at him with John's eyes? With Mary's? Her hair was fairly light. But the same was true of the child in the photographs upstairs. 

"What are you doing here?" the woman asked again, distinctly less friendly than the first time.

"Is that your child?" Sherlock asked on an off-chance.

"Of course she's mine." The woman ran her hand over the little girl's hair and held her closer.

"Rosie?" Sherlock asked hesitantly, still looking into the little girl's eyes, who stared back curiously.

"This is Valerie. And now get out of here. Arthur isn't here."

"Can I wait for him here?"

"No. Ring him if you want something from him."

"Okay." Sherlock took out his phone and typed:

_Valerie Beatty. Mean anything to you? SH_

In the same moment as Sherlock sent the text, two men barged into the flat. Barely two seconds later, the barrel of a pistol was pointing at Sherlock's head.

"Who are you and what are you doing here?" the man with the gun demanded. He was clearly agitated and nervous.

"He says he's a friend of yours," the woman answered for Sherlock.

"I know him," the second man cried in alarm. "That's Sherlock Holmes, the bloke who's together with Dr Watson. He's a cop!"

"Consulting detective," Sherlock corrected him, letting his phone slide into the pocket of his suit jacket and raising his hands automatically.

"There's already a search on. We need to leave," the man with the gun said to the woman. "Pack some things. Fast!" He waggled the gun frantically toward the stairs.

"Hold her a minute." The woman held the child out to the second man. But he took a step backward, unsure. Before Sherlock knew what was happening, the woman had dumped the towel and the girl into his arms and ran up the stairs.

The bundle in his arms was warm and damp and smelled of baby powder, and Sherlock knew right then that he could forget his original plan to fight his way out, run off and alert Lestrade. The child made him defenseless. The man with the gun grinned. The little girl watched the men with interest, sucking on her fingers and drooling.

Barely two minutes later, the woman came back downstairs with a bag.

"Leave her with him," Marsden said when his sister went to take the child back from Sherlock. "We'll take him along. He can make himself useful."

"What if he runs off with her?"

"If he tries to get away or trick us, I'll shoot the kid first. He's not about to let that happen."

A car stood outside the wall. Mrs Beatty took the girl from Sherlock until he'd settled himself on the backseat. Then she placed the child in his arms again. Arthur Marsden took the seat next to him, his pistol cocked. Mrs Beatty was on the other side. She had clothes for the little girl with her, and dressed her on Sherlock's lap while the other man pulled the car into the midday London traffic. Sherlock felt his phone vibrate briefly in his pocket. John had replied to his text.


	8. Escape

He was losing blood. Still. That wasn't good. He needed to tighten the tourniquet. Sherlock pushed his back against the concrete wall so he could drag his right leg closer and prop it up. Then he carefully loosened the wet knot around his thigh with his right hand. In his left arm, he held Rosie. She was fast asleep on his bare chest, warm and damp beneath his suit jacket. He'd taken off his shirt to tie it around his leg. Everything was wet from the thunderstorm they'd run through. But blood was also still oozing from the wound. 

Sherlock unwound the bandage a little, held one sleeve of the shirt in his teeth, and pulled the cloth more firmly around his leg. The stabbing pain made his entire body break out in a sweat, forcing tears into his eyes. He bit down on the material of the shirt as hard as he could in order not to groan out loud. With difficulty, he wrapped the shirt around the wound again, his progress slow and painful, before re-knotting the sleeves.

Rosie had moved briefly when he'd propped up his injured leg, but not awakened. Good. It was still pouring outside, but the thunder and lightning had let up. It wasn't exactly dry in the old factory – or whatever this place had once been. It was an abandoned ruin now. Sherlock sat leaning on the bare concrete wall. He'd found a scrap of sheet metal lying around and pushed it up against the wall to sit on, as the ground was wet. Less than a metre away, rain dripped from the leaky ceiling onto the filthy concrete floor, which was littered with demolition rubble. Sherlock had dipped his handkerchief into the rivulet and squeezed the rainwater out into Rosie's mouth. She had sucked greedily on the handkerchief, clearly thirsty. He was too, so he'd done the same for himself. He'd fed Rosie a couple of biscuits he'd taken from the old camper van they'd locked him up in. They must have been ancient, and had assimilated the musty odour of the rotting motorhome. But they calmed Rosie's stomach.

Sherlock leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. Rosie sighed gently, and he wrapped his other arm around her too, holding her in a comforting grip. He couldn't go any further. The pain in his leg wouldn't allow him, was sapping all of his strength. He needed to wait until daybreak, when he could get his bearings. He had no idea where they were. The others had taken everything: phone, keys, wallet, his toolkit. 

Marsden had shot at him. The last thing he'd expected. Sherlock hadn't thought he'd do it, that he would shoot at him and the child. He'd judged Marsden to be cocky and somewhat naïve, but not brutal. The kidnapper had only fired a single shot in his direction when he'd taken off. The bullet had grazed his leg just above the knee. Or maybe gone clean through. Or was still inside. Sherlock didn't know. The woman had probably stopped her brother from taking any more shots. All he'd heard was the shouting behind him, the woman's panicked screams, Marsden roaring. Then the gunshot and the pain. 

After that, everything had become a blur of dark and wet. Lightning and crashing thunder. An unbelievable volume of water thrashing down from the sky, whipped up by stormy gusts. A flood of Biblical proportions for him to run through. Run and run. Straight ahead, blind, no sense of direction. Into a forest. And onward. Darkness. The clamour of the storm. The beating of the rain. Wood cracking beneath his feet. His lungs gasping. Wetness. The searing pain in his leg. And Rosie, silently clinging to him. A meadow eventually, spanned by outsized power lines. The pain, crippling him more and more. Then the crumbling building. Refuge and protection from the rain. And the hope that no one had followed them.

They were somewhere along the Thames. Possibly still within city limits. Or outside. Sherlock wasn't sure. They'd blindfolded him for the journey. They hadn't been stopped. No roadblock. They'd tied him to the leg of a table in an abandoned, broken down motorhome and left him alone. Marsden, his sister, and the other man had gone somewhere nearby with the child to wait. He hadn't been able to see anything from the floor of the vehicle, even though it was the middle of the day. But it had smelled of water and he'd heard them talking.

"Sam, you take the dinghy and go across to Chen as soon as it gets dark," Marsden had said. "Tell him we're here ahead of schedule and he should pick up Eleonore and the kid tonight. We'll follow afterwards in the other boat. Just like we planned."

"What are we going to do with the man in the caravan?" the woman had asked.

"Leave him here."

"What if they find him?"

"No one's finding anyone here. But if they do, we'll be long gone by then, new passports, new names, and a new life. Don't worry."

"He saw us. He knows who we are."

"He doesn't know anything. It's Dr Watson we have to watch out for. You saw his text. He knows about Valerie and he can put two and two together. That's why we have to get out of here, and fast."

John? John knew what this was about? That had made Sherlock think. If John knew what this was about, why hadn't he said anything? He hadn't been able to see John's reply to his text before they'd taken his phone away. He had no idea what John had written. But Rosie's abduction obviously had something to do with John. Or maybe with Mary? And what about Eurus? Did she have a hand in it?

Hours had passed, which Sherlock had spent thinking and working at his bonds. The heat in the motorhome was oppressive and made him sweat. People were so stupid! It wasn't that easy to tie a person up in such a way that they couldn't get loose. It was usually just a question of time. Marsden obviously hadn't had any practise in it, nor the necessary knowledge. The top of the table was detachable. Sherlock had had to twist into an uncomfortable position, to be sure, but he'd been able to unlock the latch and push the tabletop off from underneath. His hands had still been tied behind his back and his feet were still bound, but he could move about the room. He'd crawled around looking for something sharp and found a scrap of tin with which he sawed at the cable ties binding his wrists. Then his feet. Then the campervan door. 

Night was already falling when Sherlock heard the sound of an outboard motor being started and revved. The chugging of a small boat moving away. He assumed the man they'd called Sam had just set out in the dinghy. So there were only two of them left: Marsden and the woman. Good. That increased his chances of escape.

And then, just as Sherlock was trying to figure out how to get close to Rosie without putting her in danger, help arrived from unexpected quarters. A thunderstorm arose. So sudden and so powerful that everything started flying around. The motorhome quaked when the destructive gusts of wind rattled at it. Then the creaking and banging of wood against wood.

"The boat!" the woman cried. "It's ramming the pier!"

Timed to coincide with the next thunderclap, Sherlock cracked open the door of the motorhome and peered out. The woman stood inside a covered wooden shelter, an open boathouse, with the child in her arms, her back to Sherlock, looking toward the shore and the pier, which Marsden was running down to. Sherlock took off like a shot. The woman was taken completely by surprise when he tore the child out of her arms. He shoved her back so hard that she fell down, and ran off. The wind shredded the woman's screams. Lightning flashed and thunder split the air. Rain immediately started pouring down at an incredible rate. Sherlock ran through the veils of water, between some trees, then across the meadow toward the nearby woods, holding the child close, which clung to him in terror. He'd almost reached the woods when the shot went off.

 

*

 

Sherlock carefully extended his injured leg. The rain had stopped a while ago. The first rays of dawn signalling the start of a new summer's day reached into the disintegrating building. The child in his arms whimpered softly and moved restlessly. Rosie was waking up, and was probably about to start crying. She needed dry clothing, fresh nappies, and food. He had to do something. Rosie struggled discontentedly, grizzling now and flinging her arms about. Sherlock opened his suit jacket, extricating her from the cocoon she'd been sleeping in. She was sweaty and stank, making it rather clear that she needed to get out of the soiled nappy. She started to weep softly when Sherlock picked her up with both hands and looked her in the face.

"We're going to get you out of this nappy now, little Watson. All right?" he said.

Rosie gaped at him a moment before crying some more.

Sherlock placed the little girl on her stomach across his good leg, took off his jacket, and laid it next to him on the sheet of metal they were sitting on. Then he put Rosie onto it. His leg hurt like the devil from the twisting motion he made as he removed her booties from her feet and took off her trousers. She wore a onesie underneath, with snaps between the legs. Sherlock undid them and pulled the shirt up, then took off the nappy. It was full and smelled horrible. Sherlock grimaced in disgust. Then he folded up the nappy and threw it as far away as he could. Rosie's bottom was soiled, so Sherlock took out his handkerchief, wet it in the puddle on the ground, and washed the little girl. He decided to write off the handkerchief as a lost cause. Then he did up the onesie again and tried to put her trousers back on. It took quite a lot of coaxing. Rosie wasn't crying anymore and seemed to be feeling much better. Sherlock's voice seemed to calm and revive her. She wriggled and huffed, trying to get away from Sherlock. He picked her up, lifting her over his head with both hands.

"Brave little Watson," Sherlock said.

She liked that. She smiled and babbled. Sherlock settled her astride his good leg. She promptly reached for his hair. Sherlock let her play with it. Fascination and joy gleamed in her blue-grey eyes as she wiggled her fingers through his hair and pulled on it. She had John's eyes. Sherlock saw it now that he had her so close and she let herself be observed. Rosie took after John. The discovery touched Sherlock in an unexpected way. Was that affection he felt?

He set the child down next to him on the sheet of metal when she wanted to get off and her urge to move around gained the upper hand. She immediately crawled over to a piece of wood that was lying around, and picked it up with great interest. It was too big for her to swallow so Sherlock let her. There was nothing nearby that might have posed any danger to her. 

He needed to try to stand up. He put his jacket back on, looked around for something to lean on, and eventually struggled to his feet. He gasped in pain. His leg was stiff and weak, and burned as if it were on fire. Any attempt to put weight on it made tears shoot into his eyes, and he buckled. He needed a big stick or something to support himself with. Sherlock let his eyes wander around the ruins, which he saw now in the daylight for the first time.

He couldn't believe his eyes at first. But then he set off right away, limping, dragging, and pulling himself the handful of metres to the lush greenery that sprouted up between the crumbling concrete pillars. They were wild blackberry bushes. Several of the fruits hung black and plump amongst the thorny briars. Sherlock picked what he could reach, putting them into the pockets of his jacket. Then he limped back to Rosie. She was still playing with the piece of wood. 

Sherlock stood over her, leaning heavily against the concrete wall. He was trembling and could hardly keep himself upright. His injured leg cramped up, sending a spasm like a trail of fire through his entire body. He moaned as he crumpled and slid down the wall to the floor. The pain flooded his mind. The world went black before his eyes. He struggled valiantly against it, but he had no chance and felt his surroundings drift away. 

Rosie! The thought shot through him like a brand when he came to again. He couldn't have been unconscious for long, but she wasn't next to him any longer. Where was she? Sherlock fought against his rising panic. He heard her crying and sobbing somewhere close by. He wanted to get up, but he couldn't anymore. Everything went black whenever he tried. Crawl it was, then. 

Sherlock pulled himself across the dirty floor in the direction from which the crying came. Every movement was agony just this side of what he could bear. Fortunately, Rosie hadn't gone far. She sat forlornly two or three metres behind the next concrete pillar, bawling. Sherlock had no idea how long it took him to reach the pillar. An eternity. Eternities of struggle and pain. Panting from the exertion, he pulled himself up to the pillar like a drowning man reaching the shore with the last of his strength.

"Rosie." He reached for her with one arm. "Rosie, come here. Come to me." But Rosie wasn't listening. She sat on the rain-soaked floor, crying, completely immersed in her own misery.

Sherlock picked up one of the bent and rusty nails lying next to him on the floor and threw it in Rosie's direction. When it hit her in the shoulder, she startled in surprise but kept crying. The next nail hit her on the hand. This time her interest was awakened by the thing that had touched her and clinked to the floor beside her. She turned toward the nail and as she reached for it, her sobbing ebbed. But the next moment, Sherlock realised in horror that he had made a mistake: Rosie stuffed the nail into her mouth.

"No! Don't! Don't eat, Rosie!" Sherlock flung himself forward, reaching out for the child. He stretched his body out across the wet floor as far as he could, just barely touching Rosie's back with the tips of his fingers. It wasn't a very elegant or friendly technique, but it worked. He grasped Rosie's little jumper and tugged it until she fell over backwards, then dragged her across the floor to him. She screamed and protested. But Sherlock had her and didn't let go despite her resistance, not even during the extremely strenuous and painful manoeuvre involved in righting himself again and sitting back against the pillar. Rosie was filthy from head to foot. And obviously extremely displeased.

"Hey, hey, little Watson," Sherlock tried to console her. He rocked her in his arms, speaking to her soothingly. "We should stay calm, Rosie. All right? And we need to stick together, the two of us, if we want to get out of here. But everything's going to be fine. It's all fine. There are even blackberries here. Look."

Sherlock reached into his pocket. Some of the berries were crushed, but he felt some whole ones too, and started to feed them to Rosie. The berries interested her, especially once she understood they could be eaten. She ate them enthusiastically, reaching for the berries with her own hands, wanting to look at them and examine them. It made a huge mess. Everything was smeared with blackberries. Rosie's face, her hands, her clothes. But that didn't matter. He had John's daughter. She sat on his good leg, and he played and chatted with her. She was happy, and as the summer sun started to burn down on the dilapidated building and the temperature went up and up inside, Rosie sank down sleepily onto Sherlock's chest and dozed off.

Sherlock closed his eyes. Despair and exhaustion chased tears down his cheeks. John. He needed John. He had John's daughter. And she needed to stay alive. No matter the cost. She would wake up again at some point. She needed water and food. He was getting weaker. His leg wasn't doing well. Not well at all. He needed to think of something. Soon. Send out a signal or get out of here. But how? Without Rosie, he might have dragged himself somehow. But with her? He needed a stretcher or something to tie her onto his back. Or he could tie her down here inside the building and try to fetch help. Both options frightened him. He couldn't put her in danger. He'd sworn to protect her.

 

*

 

A dog? There was a dog barking somewhere. And voices. Sherlock awoke from a deep lethargy. He was soaked with sweat. His eyes burned when he cracked them open. Rosie was stuck to him. She had her thumb in her mouth and was asleep, surrounded by a haze of dampness and a mildly sweet scent Sherlock had already become accustomed to. A man in a uniform stood in front of them in a halo of sunlight.

"I've got them," the man said excitedly into a walkie-talkie, even as he tried to hold back the large dog he had on a lead.

Was that John? A man was running through the building toward Sherlock.

"Sherlock!" he shouted. "Sherlock!"

Yes, it was John. Thank God! _I have Rosie, John. I have Rosie_. Sherlock held the little girl tightly against him. Rosie. So familiar, so close. Sherlock buried his nose in the child's damp hair, overcome by happiness and relief. Had he whispered her name? He didn't know. He expected John to tear his daughter out of his arms any second. A quick good-bye. Sherlock prepared himself and closed his eyes. Tears welled up underneath. Brave little Watson!

But then nothing happened. Sherlock opened his eyes, confused, and looked up at the man standing before him and gazing down at him.

"She's sleeping," Sherlock whispered. His voice was dried out and barely audible.

John sank down beside him, onto his knees, so careful. Arms wrapped around Sherlock and Rosie. Cautious and gentle. John's breath. John's sobs. A gush of dampness. John's hand running tenderly over Rosie's head, John burying his face in his daughter's hair for a long while. John's hand in Sherlock's sweat-soaked hair, rough now, perhaps clumsy, holding his head as he pressed his forehead to Sherlock's temple. John's breath. John's tears. John's lips, his whole face pressed up against Sherlock's damp skin. A choked "Sherlock," the motion of his lips palpable on his cheek. The flood of tears. John's and his.

Then John pulled back. His hand rubbed his child's back one more time, then his friend's arm. His eyes, deep and grey. The sudden alertness in them. A glance at Sherlock's leg.

"You're hurt."

Sherlock nodded. He was so exhausted, so full of tears that he couldn't speak. So much pain. So much fear.

John took a quick look at the shirt that was knotted around his thigh.

"We need an ambulance. Now!" he barked at one of the police officers who had arrived in the meantime. Then he looked into Sherlock's eyes. "Can you still hold Rosie?" he asked hoarsely. Sherlock nodded. "Good. I'm going to loosen the tourniquet a little now, okay? The circulation's been cut off. It's going to hurt like hell but we can't wait until the ambulance gets here. Tell me if it gets to be too much, if someone needs to hold Rosie."

Sherlock nodded, leaned back against the concrete pillar, tried to steel himself and relax. Tried to prepare for what was coming. Rosie was with him. John too. Whatever happened next, he could take it. He was prepared to endure any pain. John was here. Rosie was safe. Nothing else mattered.


	9. Victor

"A bone fragment sliced your artery," John said. "You were lucky that Eleonore Beatty mentioned her brother's boathouse to me once. The dogs caught Rosie's scent from there. You could have bled out."

Sherlock looked into John's eyes, astonished. It wasn't the words that amazed him. It was their hands. John had taken his hand, completely matter-of-factly, when he sat down by the bed: inserted his fingers between Sherlock's, interlocked them, and then left them like that. Just left them wrapped together on top of the hospital bedsheet, next to where Sherlock lay.

John's fingers gently squeezed Sherlock's hand. He smiled, doubtless having taken note of Sherlock's stiffness and confusion, and correctly interpreted the reason for it.

"Ella said I should just do it whenever I feel the need to," he explained. The apologetic undertone made it clear how insecure he was. "She said you'd let me know if it wasn't okay with you."

Sherlock was still staring into John's eyes. A wave of fear overtook him, paralysing him. The realisation that something was changing, perhaps had already changed. Now. Right at this moment, when he was helpless in so many ways. The frightening realisation that John was doing things that Sherlock couldn't cope with. Such simple yet complicated things as taking his hand, interlacing their fingers. So enormously clear and significant. The fear that it might be the start of something he couldn't deal with, that he didn't have a handle on.

"Sherlock?" John's voice was concerned. His eyes filled with doubt. "Please, tell me if this isn't okay with you."

Sherlock tried to breathe, to take deep breaths. A shiver ran through his body as he exhaled and felt the full weight of the intimacy of his connection with John: their hands, the heat that flowed between them, spreading through his body and threatening to steal his breath away.

"It's... nice," Sherlock whispered haltingly. His heart was beating hard and fast. He was still looking into John's eyes, where embarrassment was starting to show. Sherlock held John's hand firmly, hoping he understood. There was so much he wanted to say. So much. How scared he was of being touched this way. There was so much promise in it, opening up a world they wouldn't be able to shut down again. A world of desire. His deepest desires. His fear of demands he didn't know if he could fulfill. His heartfelt plea for leniency. For time. For patience. For space. For a chance to sort things out and understand them.

 _You long for touch and intimacy, but you can only let it happen if you initiate it, if you have control of the situation and can steer it. But you never approach anyone of your own accord._ Ella had presented an analysis even before the first time they'd talked about John.

John unclasped his hand from Sherlock's when a knock sounded at the door and Detective Inspector Lestrade entered the sickroom.

"Can I come in?"

"Of course."

Greg Lestrade stopped at the foot of the bed.

"How are you?" he asked Sherlock.

"Fine. What about Arthur Marsden, Eleonore Beatty and that Sam fellow? Do you have them?"

Greg chewed on his lip. "No. They got away. They were already gone when we got to the boathouse. That's why I'm here. I need more information. What exactly did you hear, Sherlock?"

"That someone named Chen was supposed to pick up the woman and the child. Marsden and this Sam were going to follow in their own boat. They said something about new names and passports."

Lestrade nodded. "We've already followed up on that. Chen Mortimer is on board a cargo ship that set sail that night. Officially, he boarded with his wife. They've already left British territory. According to the documentation, he's headed for South America. The port of destination is Buenos Aires. I assume the other two boarded somewhere else, or will do so."

"Or they're meeting up in Buenos Aires," John said.

"Or the woman will debark somewhere along the way," Sherlock added.

"It could be anywhere along the coast," Lestrade remarked. "They could drop her off in a lifeboat at any point."

"Their escape was probably planned well in advance," John speculated. "Valerie Beatty died six months ago. Eleonore Beatty wanted to sue me for malpractice and retained her brother's lawyer. Her complaint was rejected. The medical board found I had acted to the best of my knowledge and ability. That was three months ago. Beatty must have started planning to take Rosie at that point."

"So it was revenge," Sherlock said.

"That's our assumption right now," Lestrade answered. "Revenge, but also regaining a child. In a manner of speaking."

"Is there a South American connection?"

"No, we haven't been able to find anything yet."

Sherlock searched his memory for an atlas. The Atlantic. Coastlines. The freighter would either head southwest for the open sea and then follow the South American coast down. Or it would take the route south along the European coast. That was more likely in this case.

"The freighter will have set course south along the European coast," he said. "Spain and Portugal would lend themselves perfectly to jumping ship."

"How are we supposed to intercept them if all we know is that they might hit land somewhere on Spain's western coast?" Lestrade asked.

"Interpol?"

Lestrade chuckled grimly. "For attempted kidnapping? They don't have the child anymore, and they haven't blackmailed or killed anyone. And we can't go after them internationally for assault, even if it was with a deadly weapon. Not even mentioning a deployment in international waters. It's definitely not enough."

The hospital room was silent for several long moments. Then Sherlock said pensively, "The escape is quite complex, especially taking the child into account. It was professionally planned. There must be helpers available to infiltrate daycare facilities and manipulate children, and others to organise forged passports and other documents. Documents that identify Eleonore Beatty as Chen Mortimer's wife and Valerie as his child, for example. We can therefore conclude that Marsden wasn't acting on his own."

"Yeah, you could say that. At the very least he has a network at his disposal." Lestrade was in agreement.

"What if Chen Mortimer really is Valerie's father?" John asked. "Beatty's divorced and lives with her brother. And as far as I recall, she did mention at some point that her daughter's father was a sailor."

"Then we'll have to account for the possibility that Mortimer and Beatty will go underground as a couple," Lestrade said. "I think we'll pursue this Chen Mortimer. I'll let you know if I find out anything else."

Lestrade lifted a hand to say good-bye and left. John took a deep breath and visibly collapsed in the chair beside Sherlock's bed. Sherlock looked him over. John's expression was sombre and worried.

"Why didn't you say anything? About the child that died? About the malpractise suit?" Sherlock asked gently, trying not to make it sound like a reproach.

John looked up. Painful memories etched a trail across his face.

"I talked a lot about it with Mary. It was hard for me back then. It's still hard. The baby would still be alive if I'd made the right decisions. But I made the wrong one."

"What happened?"

"Beatty brought Valerie to the surgery with an upper respiratory infection. Nothing dramatic. Kids usually handle stuff like that easily, and it strengthens their immune system. That's why I didn't prescribe antibiotics, just a mucolytic so she could breathe better, and sent them home. I didn't know Valerie had a congenital immune disorder. The sepsis turned fatal in a few hours."

"You couldn't have known, John."

"I should have given her antibiotics. Other doctors would have. If I had, she'd still be alive."

"You were absolved of any responsibility."

"Yeah. That's a great comfort. She's dead." John's voice was bitter.

"You never said anything about it to me."

"Would it have interested you? You were solving cases like a man possessed. You didn't even have time for Rosie's christening, Sherlock."

John's eyes. Grief. Behind that, disappointment reigniting like a red glow amongst black coals. Pain. A few sparks of anger. Still. Sherlock's heart clenched. It wouldn't have interested him. John was right. He'd been solving cases like a madman, had tried to suppress the fact that everything was different. Had acted as if everything was like before. As if nothing had changed. And in doing so, he'd overlooked John.

Their eyes met. And held. Silent. Sherlock struggled with grief and despair, both threatening to take control of him. The same old minefield between them that wouldn't let itself be cleared. He couldn't just trample over it. He knew that. He needed to endure it. The mistakes he'd made. The injuries he'd inflicted on John. His inability to see them. John's inability to forgive him.

"I apologise, John," Sherlock said very softly. "I apologise for everything I've ever done to you. I know I've hurt you. More than once. Again and again. I'm sorry. I'm so terribly sorry. I've apologised several times already and I'll keep doing so. A thousand times. A hundred thousand times if necessary. But it's not enough, is it? Will it ever be enough? Why isn't it enough, John? What should I do? Tell me what I should do."

Sherlock felt overwhelmed by helplessness and misery. He swallowed hard. Tried to retain his composure. He longed so much to be close to John. For there to be peace between them. For the strength of their friendship. He felt so weak and inadequate.

John's eyes were on him. He was also upset. His breaths were quick and laboured. Sherlock saw the struggle in his friend's eyes. The thousand thoughts. Doubt. Regret. Weighing up. And then something he recognised but hadn't expected: fear. And at the same time the willingness of a soldier to act decisively. A long, searching look. Then certainty. Decisiveness. And within that: still, fear. John sat up, straightened his back. 

Sherlock struggled to breathe when John's hand felt for his and held fast to it. John's strength and affection flowed into him. Sherlock held his hand firmly. With all the love he felt erupting within him. They looked into each other's eyes for several long, confusing heartbeats. Then John spoke, a tremor in his voice, but clear and matter-of-fact:

"I want to tell you something, Sherlock. Something that I think simply needs to be said. I want you to listen to me, all right?"

Sherlock nodded fearfully. John lowered his eyes for a long moment to collect himself before looking up again and saying, his voice now uncertain: "Listen, Sherlock. I love you. You know that, hm? I'm broadcasting it on every frequency."

Sherlock nodded timidly, taken aback at the words.

"You're broadcasting the same thing. On different channels than me, but you are."

Sherlock nodded again, barely perceptible, ensnared by what John was daring to say.

"That's the reason we can hurt each other so much. Ella showed me that, and I think she's right. Love alone isn't enough. It's like we're loving past each other. So many times, I can't reach you. I feel misunderstood and pushed away, and that makes me angry. There are so many hurdles, Sherlock, and we can't jump over them all. You can't, and I can't. I want us to examine those hurdles. Together. Because we're not getting anywhere on our own. I want us to see Ella together. As soon as possible."

"You've already proposed that," Sherlock said faintly.

"I'll keep proposing it until we've done it."

"Relationship therapy."

A tiny smirk appeared on John's face. "Whatever you want to call it. But the way things are now is tearing me apart. And it doesn't seem like you're doing too well either."

Sherlock nodded mutely. They were still looking at each other. Solemn. But calmer now. Ready for whatever needed to happen. It was a strange and novel situation. Not a case, not a criminal problem, not a public mission. Just them. The two of them. Their hands joined. And the topic they were discussing so earnestly was them. 

"I need to pick Rosie up," John said after a while, glancing at the clock. "Mrs Hudson's minding her." He gently separated his fingers from Sherlock's and stood up. "I'll be back tomorrow, okay?"

"Will you bring Rosie?"

"If you'd like."

"It's Sunday, you'll have her anyway. Bring her along."

 

*

 

There were always women between them. Women who told them who they were, what they were. Who told them they belonged together. Mrs Hudson, who didn't hesitate to meddle. Irene Adler. Mary. Molly. Eurus. Ella. And now Rosie. Although the little girl couldn't talk yet, she was still a kind of bridge. Were they truly unable to understand what they were to each other without being defined via a female interface? Were they honestly unable to face each other as two men who loved each other? Did they always need a female between them, a connector, a buffer, a safety zone? Why did they hide behind Rosie, inserting her between them whenever it came to physical contact and affection? Like an unhappy couple trying to save their marriage by having a child together. A surface on which to project everything they couldn't give each other. A defenseless substitute to enact their unfulfilled hopes and desires.

Were they loving past each other? The notion preoccupied Sherlock. That remark of John's. Were they loving past each other, and therefore always needing someone to corral and moderate their love?

Sherlock was well aware that he was the one who had asked about Rosie and told John to bring her along. She laid claim to John's care and attention. Why did Sherlock want that? Yes, he was afraid of John's touch. Of the undeniable tenderness of John's fingers wrapping around his. He could still feel it. Could feel the overwhelming sensation of the heat coursing through him, even now. It was what he longed for. Why did he put Rosie between them, between John's fingers and his?

'The dungeon of subconscious fears,' was what Eurus had called it. _Victor is now John, and he's still down there._ Eurus was probably right. But what was he afraid of? Victor?

Was he afraid of abandoning Victor? Of betraying Victor's friendship? He'd never had an opportunity to mourn for him. To mourn his first great love. To let go of it. To relegate it to the past. To free himself of it. Was he afraid – subconsciously – of cheating on Victor? Of leaving him in the cold water down the well, letting him die, allowing him to drown in agony and turning to someone else?

Victor. Sherlock only had vague memories of him. He'd been blond. Tow-headed. His eyes had also been pale. A smile that had surrounded and captivated him. He remembered that. Along with a feeling of light-hearted happiness. They'd understood each other without words. They'd slept cuddled up together in the same bed. Safety. No pain. No disappointment. Just a self-evident connection. Soulmates.

Sherlock stared down at the lawn which extended below his hospital window. He sat at the little table by the window, his leg propped up. He had a view of the entire grounds from up here on the fifth floor. Grass. A couple of trees. Benches. A low fountain in the middle. An orderly pushed a patient in a wheelchair along the asphalt path. Sherlock had taken out his laptop which John had brought him, but never got around to opening it.

Victor was dead. The DNA analysis of the bones had proven it. They belonged to Victor Trevor. Sherlock knew that. Victor was dead. But the little boy in him still sat in front of the gravestone at Musgrave that belonged to nobody, and waited for his friend. Diligently; forever. Unflinching. Unerring in his trust in the other boy's love. Faithful to the death. Just as Victor had been faithful to him. To the death.

If Victor were still alive, if they had grown to adulthood together, would they still be best bosom buddies? Would Victor have brought him the laptop instead of John? What would Victor look like? He would have a family. Sherlock was certain of that. His open, friendly personality would have attracted women, and he would have chosen one and had children with her. Victor would have included Sherlock in his family. Sherlock would have been his best man, and the godfather of his first child. He would have liked Victor's wife, and would have been invited over on Sundays, to the garden of their little house, to dinner and family festivities. Victor would have hugged him when they got together and smiled at him with his pale, cheerful eyes, an eternal connection throughout all times.

Sherlock caught himself sitting there with his mouth hanging open and his heart pounding hard. He sucked air deep into his lungs and exhaled shakily. What was he thinking? Where did those images come from? There was no Victor. He didn't exist any more. He'd died because of Sherlock. Because of his love and his sister's jealousy. They hadn't even had a chance to say good-bye.

John.

A tight, hot, searing fire surged upward in Sherlock's chest, singeing his throat, his eyes, making them overflow. Strong and sudden. A torrent of bottomless grief.

John. The thought of John and so much warmth. His physical presence. John was innocent, and Sherlock was punishing him for not being Victor. For not being the one he was waiting for, the one the sad little boy was still waiting for at nobody's graveside. The one who no longer existed, and hadn't for a very long time. The stubborn little boy, the steadfast pirate who wouldn't let anyone take Victor away from him or usurp his place. 

But he'd saved John. He'd saved John from the well. John, who had found Victor's bones and brought them to the surface. Who had allowed Victor to be found. In every sense. _John_ was his best friend. He had been _John's_ best man, had liked _his_ wife, had been part of _his_ little family. He was the godfather of _John's_ daughter. John. Not Victor. He loved _John_.

He loved John. But Victor wasn't stepping down from that innermost spot. The spot that belonged to the one person Sherlock loved the most. His one true love.

Sherlock's heart beat wild and fast. His one true love. The words throbbed inside him. He had a true love. He had one now, in his present-day life as a grown man. He was alive, flesh and blood. He had to let Victor go. Release him. Relinquish him to the past. He had to mourn for him. Cry. Rage. Whatever was necessary. Anything. But he could no longer allow him to block that spot.

Sherlock wiped the moisture from his face with the back of his hand. He needed to talk to Ella. He had found the nucleus.


	10. Essence

The man who had brought them moved a chair over to the safety line in front of the glass wall before withdrawing. Using both crutches, Sherlock limped around the chair and carefully lowered himself onto it. His leg hurt when he stood for too long. He was grateful to be able to sit down and stretch it out. He couldn't put weight on it yet.

Mycroft set the bag on the floor next to the chair. He peered thoughtfully into the glass prison where their sister lived. She sat cross-legged on the floor, in her lap a notebook of sheet music that she was apparently memorising. She didn't look up, hadn't so much as reacted to the bright floodlight that had come on when her brothers entered the vestibule.

Sherlock laid both crutches on the ground next to him and reached for the bag. He took out the violin case, opened it and extracted the bow, and tightened it. Next came the violin. It was out of tune from the flight and the fluctuations in temperature. He tuned it carefully. Mycroft stood beside him and watched Eurus. She was focused on reading her notes. 

Sherlock waited. After none of them had moved for several minutes, he addressed Mycroft: "Leave us alone. We'd like to play now."

Eurus looked up from her notebook and said in a loud, clear voice: "No. Mycroft stays."

"You wanted to play the Brahms," Sherlock ventured. "You said you'd composed a second part for it."

"You found Rosie," she said without answering him. She slowly set aside the notebook, then stood up and came to the glass partition. Her eyes scanned Sherlock's entire body, assessing. "You're hurt," she noted. "Your leg. You can't even stand. And you can't run away anymore."

"Why should I want to run away?" Sherlock didn't understand the remark.

"There are no coincidences," Eurus declared. "Up is down, and inside is outside. Everything is connected. Nothing is unique. What happens internally manifests externally. And vice versa: What goes on outside also materialises inside. You've found what hurts and stops you from standing on your own two feet. Haven't you? It's been incarnated. Now you need to deal with it physically as well. You can't run away anymore. It's in your flesh. Interesting. Did you have sex with John?"

"What's that supposed to mean?" Sherlock was aggravated. More at Mycroft's expression of astonishment and disgust than at Eurus's shameless directness.

"No," Eurus answered her own question in passing as her gaze slid over to Mycroft, both interested and appraising. "But you've brought me another suggestion."

Sherlock startled. "No! No. Mycroft only came along because I'm impeded. My old proposal still holds. I only have one Holmes, Eurus. Just the one."

"There are no coincidences, Sherlock. Everything is connected. Nothing is unique." A peculiar flash deep in her clear blue eyes. As if something were hatching in Eurus' mind. An insight?

"Eurus. Please. Mycroft is not a suggestion. He has nothing to do with it. Absolutely nothing."

Mycroft looked from one to the other. "What have I nothing to do with? Can someone please explain what is going on here?"

"No." Sherlock and Eurus spoke at the same time, looking at each other nonplussed for two seconds before Eurus smiled meaningfully.

"Absolutely nothing is unique," she said contentedly. She took a step back from the glass wall and examined her two brothers at length. "The last generation of Holmeses," she mused. "We three are the end of the line. Do you realise that?"

She turned around and went to the violin case that lay on a shelf beside the bed, took out the instrument and the bow, and returned with them to the glass partition.

"Isn't it a shame," she said as she tuned her violin, "that none of us procreated? The three of us, all with much higher than average intelligence, will never pass on our genius to the world of the future."

"All three of us are loners," Mycroft replied sourly.

"No. We only tell ourselves that, Mycroft. We're alone, you and I, because we lack any sense of empathy. Sherlock is the exception. That's why I always wanted to have him for myself. And that's why you've watched over and protected him his whole life. But Sherlock won't procreate either. He's in love with a man. We are the last of the Holmes geniuses. It's too bad for our mother's legacy. She wasted her genius on us children. We're wasting ours on nothing at all."

"We're not wasting it on nothing," Mycroft said in his defense. "Mine stands in the service of the security of our country. And Sherlock's as well, if in a different capacity."

"Sherlock's motive was never to serve the country. He thinks he chases down criminals but he's really chasing himself. Because he's afraid to stand still. If he did, he might catch a glimpse of himself and see what he is."

"I came to play the violin with you," Sherlock interrupted his sister. "Could we perhaps focus on that?"

Eurus gave Sherlock an astonished smile. "No, that's not why you're here, Sherlock," she said as she concentrated on twisting the fine tuner of the E string, checking the pitch by plucking the string with the tip of her ring finger.

"Brahms?" Sherlock said, trying to keep himself separate from what he'd just heard, not to get angry or distracted.

Eurus set her bow to the string, closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and began Brahms's Violin Sonata No. 3 in D Minor. When Sherlock joined in, Eurus switched to the second part. It picked up the motif of the original, imitating it, turning it around, transposing it, mirroring it, accompanying it and carrying it further. The part she had composed herself.

 

*

 

John had been right. The flat on Baker Street was inconvenient when limping around it on crutches all day. Conversely, John's flat was on the ground level, spacious, and largely free of steps, threshholds, carpet edges, or other things to make you trip – if you discounted Rosie's toys which lay scattered across the floor. 

Sherlock had accepted the offer to stay at John's place temporarily. It wasn't a decision he'd put much thought into. John had offered and he'd said yes. The heady image of John coming home every evening. Coming to where he was. With Rosie. That the three of them would spend the night together. Banded together. Each in their own bed, but together in the flat. Each within reach of the others. 

John always left all the doors open. The one to Rosie's room, the one to his bedroom, and the one to the living room was always open anyway. Sherlock was sleeping on the couch and could hear both of them, the one over here, the other over there. He lay between them, between John and Rosie. He heard them breathing deeply as they slept, their murmurs when they dreamt, the sound of blankets and mattresses when they turned over. John would shuffle past him whenever Rosie whimpered and cried in the middle of the night, and he would go over from the bedroom through the living room to the nursery to comfort her.

Sherlock enjoyed sitting on the couch all day, his leg propped up, his laptop on his lap or his violin tucked under his chin. He'd been worried at first that he'd be bored, alone in the flat all day, but surprisingly that wasn't the case. He enjoyed not having Mrs Hudson disturb his peace. In the two days since he'd been there, he'd mainly played the violin and slept a lot. He couldn't recall the last time he'd slept so much and so well. A quiet sense of happiness floated like an enchantment over the periods when he lay there dozing, letting his thoughts be carried away by the dapples of sunlight painted on the living room wall by the midday sun; they moved with the sun's progression, becoming longer and paler, climbing the wall diagonally before finally fading away on the top shelf of the bookcase at the end of the day. A process that announced John would be arriving home soon.

Eurus was right. He'd been chasing himself, running away from himself. The whole time. Doing nothing had been more stressful to him, made him more frantic, than anything else. The fear of standing still and having to acknowledge himself. Now his body was involved. He couldn't run away anymore. He sat in John's flat and let time pass. It passed indiscriminately. He observed the route of the sun, daydreamed, answered emails, and spent hours on end practising the piece Eurus had composed for him. 

She'd handed him the notes without saying a word. Written in a clear, legible hand. The piece was technically challenging, mostly due to the innumerable flageolets that sometimes made entire passages sound as if they were echoing in distant worlds. But mostly, Eurus's music was foreign-sounding. The motifs consisted of unusual intervals that challenged Sherlock's ear and strained his musical memory. Sherlock had to memorise virtually every measure separately. Sometimes, he recognised the overall theme of the motif once he'd linked up several measures in a row, but not always. The piece – which was structured like a shortened sonata – was titled 'With Pain's Dying Breath'. Eurus hadn't made any notations regarding tempo or mood. Sherlock tried to play it at sixty beats per minute. That made the quickly rambling sixteenth-note ligatures sound too slow to him, but it enabled him to master the capricious leaps. He was going to ask Eurus to play the piece for him in order to get an idea of how it was intended to sound.

However, Sherlock was preoccupied much more by the title of the composition than the notes. 'With Pain's Dying Breath'. Giving pieces titles like that was a very Romance-era thing to do. Earlier eras had tended toward descriptive titles: Fugue in D Minor, Sonata for Two Violins in A Major, Minuet, Suite for Orchestra. And following the Romantic period, there had been a return to mainly emphasising descriptions: Scherzo à la Russe, Eight Pieces for Flute. 'With Pain's Dying Breath'. What was that supposed to tell him? What did it mean? Was Eurus trying to send him a message? Was it a puzzle? Did it have anything to do with what she required of him in return for Rosie? How did a woman who killed people without a single ounce of compassion come up with a title like that? And how did she come up with music like that at all, given that she mainly played Classical music?

It wasn't twelve-tone music. Nor was it diatonic. It wasn't tonal. At best, it might have been termed atonal. In any case, it was devoid of any defined tonality and yet gave the impression of being highly structured. It had nothing whatsoever to do with Sherlock's usual playing or listening habits up to now. Sherlock wasn't sure whether it was the work of an avant-garde genius or a madwoman. Or both.

"That sounds surreal," John said when he came home and turned on the light in the living room. 

It was late; the sun spots had disappeared into the bookcase a long time ago. Sherlock had worked through several bars, memorised them in the dark as he often did, repeating the fingerings and storing what his ear had heard. The sudden burst of light from the living room lamp tore Sherlock out of his thoughts, out of the meditative agogic repetitions. 

John came in with Rosie sleeping on one arm and carrying a plastic bag with Thai food. Sherlock put the violin away and reached for the crutches, intending to lever himself up. John waved him down.

"Stay where you are," he said and put the plastic bag on the coffee table in front of Sherlock. "I'll just put Rosie to bed and get out of these things."

It was after 10 PM. John had let him know ahead of time. Once a month was his turn for the weekly evening consultations that the doctors at the surgery took it in turns to cover.

Sherlock cleaned his violin and bow, stowed both in the case, and put it away. Then he unpacked the plastic bag, setting out the serviettes and plastic cutlery alongside the polystyrene containers. John had brought green curry with chicken and vegetables for him. Fried rice with beef for himself. Just like back on Baker Street. Was that feeling flowing through him happiness? Was it happiness to have someone who knew exactly what you wanted? Who thought nothing of making decisions on your behalf and bringing the right thing? Was that happiness, and he was just now realising it? Had he simply not noticed it all that time on Baker Street?

Sherlock closed his eyes, sinking into the warmth that surrounded his body and opened his heart and mind wide. He had felt it, even back then. But he'd been afraid. Had tried to separate John from every hint of emotion with the scalpel of his brain. Was that the reason he'd jumped off the roof of Bart's, because it hadn't worked anymore? Was that why he'd allowed everything to escalate like it had? Destroy what he couldn't control. Cut John off. There would have been other solutions back then. He should have involved John.

John smelled damp and freshly showered when he stood in front of Sherlock in pyjamas and a t-shirt with two wine glasses in one hand and a bottle of red wine in the other. He lifted the hand with the bottle inquiringly, and Sherlock nodded.

"I haven't really thanked you properly," John said as he handed Sherlock one of the glasses filled with wine. "For finding Rosie and saving her. Just in time before she would have been lost somewhere abroad, maybe forever. Even if I still don't quite get how you figured out all of that with Beatty. So, thank you, Sherlock."

"The Holmes genius." Sherlock smiled. As the rims of their glasses touched and their eyes met, he felt something chilly in his heart break. His statement wasn't a lie. And yet he was lying to John again.

They ate in silence. Like in the old days. A different flat. A different couch. The same food. The same lies.

Involve John. Should he?

"We're going to see Ella tomorrow," John said pensively after they'd finished eating, just with their wine glasses, sat beside each other on the couch, sunk deep into the cushions, relaxed. "And can I tell you something? It's ridiculous because I was the one who wanted it. But I'm scared to death over it."

"That's not ridiculous, John. I'm scared too. More than I've ever been. Or in a different way than I've ever been. Something like that. I don't know. But I'm scared too."

John took a deep breath beside him, and Sherlock turned his head to meet John's eyes. They were dark in the weak light of the floor lamp that stood beside the couch. And they were close. John was sitting very close to Sherlock. Their shoulders were touching.

"Why are we so scared of each other?" John asked very softly, his voice frank.

Sherlock's heart was beating hard and fast, thrumming in his ears and making him dizzy. The alcohol certainly played its part as well. But it wasn't the main reason. Sherlock felt the wine glass shaking in his hand and rested it on his thigh. It still shook, and Sherlock looked away from John and held the glass with both hands.

"It's the essence," he whispered. His voice almost failed him.

"The essence?"

"The innermost core. The origin of all things. The nucleus of actions. Thoughts. Emotions." Sherlock raised his eyes and looked at John. Deep grey. John didn't understand. Sherlock swallowed hard. "You," he explained softly, "are the essence of my actions, thoughts, and emotions. Of my entire life. That's why I'm scared."

John's eyes. Wide. Disbelieving. John's lips were slightly parted. He was breathing hard. But he didn't say anything. Sherlock felt his entire body shaking. It took all of his strength to hold onto the glass. Had John understood him? Had he gone too far? Sherlock hadn't thought there would be no response. Absolutely nothing. It unsettled him. Had he said the wrong thing? Too much? Too little? Did he need to explain?

"I mean that fear is a..."

"Stop." John raised his hand toward Sherlock. His fingertips touched Sherlock's collarbone, exerted a gentle pressure there.

Sherlock stopped, confused. John's fingers brushed Sherlock's t-shirt and he seemed to be dazed and bewildered as he said, "That's what you are for me too, Sherlock."

Their eyes met. Sherlock's heart threatened to burst, throwing his head into utter chaos. He didn't know what to say or do. All he knew was that they had just done it. They had just taken the first step toward something that could no longer be taken back. They were in the midst of revealing things that lay much deeper than words could ever reach.

John lowered his gaze, shaking his head with an incredulous chortle. Then he looked again into Sherlock's eyes. Searched them. He slowly put his glass down on the coffee table. John's warm hands, releasing Sherlock's glass from his cramped fingers. One of John's hands stayed on his after he set the glass aside.

"Come here." His voice was low, uncertain.

A slight tug. Sherlock put his arm around John, and he turned toward Sherlock, gently drawing him closer. The embrace was cautious at first, probably due to Sherlock's injured leg, which they both were mindful of. Then the hug became tighter. Sherlock closed his eyes and held John with both arms. John's breath on his neck, a sigh, pulse beating hard. John's arms around his neck, strong and firm. The scent of shower gel, of John's damp hair and John's skin. Sherlock leaned his face into John's neck, pressed his nose into the hotly throbbing spot behind John's ear, inhaled the captivating scent, tasted John's skin with his lips. A moan escaped his throat when he tried to take a breath. John nestled in closer to him, and the strength with which John embraced him triggered a wave of untamed yearning, an overwhelming desire to reach into John's hair, to explore him with his mouth, to taste him, to conquer him.

Coerced by his need, Sherlock put his hands on John's neck, in his hair, brushed his lips down John's hot neck, licked John's skin in a mindless delirium. John gasped. He tasted of storms and fulfillment. Of infernos and paradise. Of frenzies and profound peace. John's lips. Sherlock paused, surprised. John hands on his cheeks. He was holding Sherlock's head. John's fingers caressing his face, his hair. John's eyes. So close. John's lips just millimetres from his. A hot stream of breath. 

When their lips touched, it was so gentle, so incredibly tender, that Sherlock thought for a moment he was going to faint. The frantic hunger was gone. There was something else now as their lips brushed, tested, moved against each other, careful, seeking. Something more personal. Deeply intimate. Private. Loving. Something meaningful that belonged only to them. Just the two of them. They latched onto each other cautiously, expressed their devotion through nuzzling touches. Longing. It was longing. Longing for each other.

Their lips separated reluctantly. They leaned their foreheads against each other, bewitched, their eyes closed, quiet. John's fingers still played with Sherlock's curls when they sat up. Their eyes met. John's were different. So incredibly beautiful. Clear and deep and filled with something that overwhelmed Sherlock, flooding him with happiness. It was as if he had reached John by breaking through a glass wall. He saw in John's eyes that it was true. John smiled thoughtfully, leaving his hand in Sherlock's.

"I always dreamed it could be like this," John said quietly. "But when I was awake, I didn't believe it anymore."

"We're awake."

"I hope so."

They smiled at each other. John reached for the wine glasses on the table and handed one to Sherlock. They drank quietly, sinking back into the cushions, sinking into each other, and Sherlock did what he had wanted to for so long: he put his arm around John's shoulders and held him.


	11. Consensus

"When I'm with a woman, it's all about sex. I feel it in my body, and it's very clear. It's clear to her and it's clear to me, and there's an automatic consensus," John explained. Then added after a couple of heartbeats: "It's different with Sherlock. It's not about sex. Even if I don't a priori exclude a physical aspect."

"What is it about with Sherlock?"

John caught Sherlock's eye. They sat across from each other in Ella's office. Precisely as far away from each other as Ella was from each of them. Everyone in their own space. An equilateral triangle of communication. Ella didn't allow them to form an alliance.

Sherlock was silent. Had fallen silent a while ago in light of what John was revealing.

"I don't know," John said slowly, his gaze still locked on Sherlock's and his brow now creased with concern. "I thought it was about love. But that's – not quite – it either." John hesitated. "Maybe," he said very softly, "I don't know what love is."

"Can you formulate what the core is of what you want or need from your friend?"

John's grey eyes searched Sherlock's. Sherlock's pulse beat hard and fast. It was difficult to endure this conversation. To endure all of these things, this intimacy. Secrets. Buried deep down, since time immemorial. Lured out of a dark cave like skittish, wild animals. Tempted to the cave entrance until the point at which the first rays of diffuse light revealed a vague outline of their shape. Secrets that sometimes stretched forth their heads, blinded and unseeing in the brightness. That sometimes withdrew again, growling. And sometimes left their den, feeling their way curiously into the light, stretching and showing themselves in their hideousness and their beauty.

John's gaze was deep and searching. His grey eyes wide open and intense. Sherlock caught himself digging his fingers into the armrest of the chair, barely breathing. He tried to relax. Tried to breathe. Tried to open himself to John. To allow what was happening. They'd wanted this, both of them. He'd wanted this, had accepted John's proposal. He knew it was important for both of them. Essential. He needed to go through it, needed to get through this difficult hour. Needed to endure it, even if everything inside him was in flames and his entire being was poised to run away and crawl under a rock somewhere.

John took his eyes off Sherlock and looked at Ella. Then he said, slowly and with a helplessness in his voice, as if he himself couldn't comprehend what he was saying: "Him." And after several seconds of total silence, he added, "I need him; Sherlock. I want him. Everything he is."

And in the long, utter stillness surrounding the words, something broke in Sherlock. An ancient vessel. It fractured at a central point with a hollow but painful crack, a fissure that immediately spread across the encrusted surface, through the dull patina of all those years, splitting and tearing apart the hardened varnish. The vessel broke apart and tumbled down. Tumbled and tumbled into the endless darkness. Sherlock felt it falling. Falling into the nothingness. The impact broke through his foundation. And Sherlock fell. Fell into the shards, into the emptiness, into the hole in the foundation.

He closed his eyes. Tried to breathe. He covered his face with both hands. He was shaking like a leaf. He struggled desperately for air. The contents of the vessel welled up from the depths of the darkness, a horrible, viscous blackness, a writhing, hissing cloud that enveloped and suffocated him. Sherlock struggled to breathe, but his throat was closed off. His chest was walled off. He sucked air into his lungs with a rattling gasp. He was shaken by dry sobs. The thick black mass twisted inexorably up out of him, adhering to him and blocking his airways. Sherlock cried out, horrified to hear the miserable, grating sound squeezing its way out of his larynx. He also heard Ella's voice, as if at a great distance, speaking calmly to John: "Stay in your chair, John. Let him be."

Sherlock fought. He fought hard. He fought alone. For an eternity. Fought for breath. Fought to free himself. Fought for an end. For peace. For redemption. 

It came suddenly. A wave of weakness that abruptly washed over him. The black presence fled, leaving behind a raw and gaping emptiness that made him shiver. That shook him, rattled him right down to the core. Sherlock felt the hardness in him surrender, felt his skeleton collapse as he caved in. He was crying uncontrollably. A flood of tears. His body was shaking. He felt himself shivering feebly in his chair. He didn't know what was happening to him. Something was assuming shape, showing itself in the flesh. _Up is down. Inside is outside._ Eurus. Oxygen flowed into Sherlock's lungs, and he screamed when he exhaled. A panicked gurgle escaping his throat. With the next breath, a moan. A sound. At least it was a sound. Air. It was dark, but he could breathe. Breathe and cry.

Quite a lot of time passed. At least it felt that way to him. Sherlock no longer had any sense of time, didn't know how long he'd sobbed to himself in the muffled twilight. Someone handed him something soft and dry. A handful of tissues. Sherlock wiped his face with them. He was still shaking. Ella stood in front of him, watching him intently. She plucked a few more tissues from the box in her hand and passed them to Sherlock. She'd opened the window. Air cooled by that morning's summer rain flowed into the room. Sherlock inhaled it gratefully. He slowly returned to himself. To the chair in Ella's office. Ella handed him a glass of cold water. He drank it greedily. It refreshed him in an unexpectedly comprehensive way.

John sat on his chair, pale and silent, his expression one of deep concern. Ella had kept him away from Sherlock. Sherlock signalled him with his eyes that everything was all right. John nodded back, barely perceptibly. His eyes remained anxious and worried.

 

*

 

The dampness of the summer rain still hovered in the old trees. Their leaves were heavy with water, the grass and paths wet. It smelled of moss and the weathered stones on the old graves. They walked silently side by side. Sherlock with his crutches, John right next to him, adjusting his gait to Sherlock's limp. The gravel on the path crunched under the crutches' rubber tips and the soles of their shoes. An overly loud and omnipresent sound in the stillness of the cemetery and the two men's silence. John rested his hand on Sherlock's arm when they arrived at the fork in the path, mutely guiding him. His touch light, very light, yet filled with so much warmth, firmness, and care. Sherlock needed all of it.

He still felt confused and unsettled inside. The weakness was still there, along with a sense of having been emptied out. Sherlock couldn't explain what had happened at Ella's. Something in him had broken, and he didn't know what it meant. But John was still here, was with him. John was closer than ever. Sherlock felt him. Felt his strength, his presence, his attentiveness. John was with him a hundred percent, even when he was lost in thought as he walked at Sherlock's side. John was here. That was the most important thing.

Sherlock had wanted – had insisted – on going to Mary's grave together with John. He'd expressed his wish while still at Ella's, a sudden, urgent need that wasn't grounded in any logic. He yearned for Mary with an immediacy that even he was startled by. But he needed John for this. Needed John more than ever without understanding why.

The grave lay in a patch of lawn with newer burials, shadowed by trees. It was meticulously cared for. They came to a stop. John had brought flowers, small wood anemones in pale, tender pink; a handful of innocent endearments he'd purchased at the flower shop across from the cemetery gate. John put them into the vase at the grave, after first removing the wilted chrysanthemums and filling the vase with fresh water. He did so slowly and quietly. With practised motions. Unspectacular and yet touching. A kind of routine. Flowers for Mary. Sherlock watched with a sense of disaffection. Was this all that remained? Flowers now that she was dead? Had John given her flowers when she was alive? Would Mary have even wanted him to? Did she want him to now?

Sherlock observed John. He'd got thin. Distinctly older and quieter. The choleric high spirits had faded to pensive solemnity. Perhaps resignation. The care with which he straightened the flowers in the vase. How often had he brought Mary flowers already? The helpless gesture was all that remained. An attempt to memorialise a past love with an outward sign. A useless action. Sherlock could recall the precise moment when John had come to him on Baker Street and wept bitterly. Broken. Disappointed in himself. A traitor to his own ideals. To his love for his wife. To his respect for the mother of his child. To his loyalty toward his friend. John had betrayed Mary. Would have cheated on her sexually too, if Eurus's perfidious game hadn't led to her cover being blown. The woman on the bus.

Sherlock stood leaning on his crutches and gazed at the name carved into the gravestone. Mary E. Watson, nee Morstan. Illusions. Beneath the stone lay the ashes of one of the most dangerous agents, a woman who had killed without scruple. A life that had disappeared without a trace. A secret that had died out. All that was left a name and the gentle, apologetic, helpless anemones.

John stood beside Sherlock and placed his hand on Sherlock's back. A light touch, nothing more. 

"You almost cheated on Mary with my sister," Sherlock reflected.

"Your sister is very like you," John replied. "Elizabeth – the woman on the bus – was mysterious and challenging. She approached me directly and won me over just like that. Like you did. Back then."

"She revealed herself before anything happened."

"It had already happened. Inside me. It had happened in my emotions. Like with you. You set off a catastrophe when things threatened to get serious. Like your sister. But it had already happened. You'd changed everything. Like her. I wasn't the same person anymore."

John let his hand sink. It slid away from Sherlock's back. "Mary accepted who I'd become because of you," John went on. "A man who loves a man who would never be able to fulfill his desires. She knew it before I'd even understood it myself. I clung to her so I wouldn't have to see it. Your sister tore me out of that illusion. She showed me that it wasn't about Mary. That it had never been about Mary. One smile from a Holmes and I was lost."

Sherlock took a deep breath. He needed some time to come to terms with what John was saying. To find his own words. "We've both changed, John," he then said quietly. "Mary's death. Eurus. I'm not the man who runs away from every little obligation anymore. Give me a chance. Give us both a chance."

Sherlock felt for John's arm, for his hand. John took it in his, squeezed it, and held it firmly.

"I am," he said. "I am, Sherlock." Then, a few seconds later: "Can I ask you something? Something personal? It's been niggling at me for a while. The thing with Janine. She portrayed you as an insatiable sex fiend. The gossip rags were full of all those kinky stories."

"They were wrong. She wanted revenge."

"That's what I thought. I couldn't imagine that you were... like that."

"I never slept with Janine. I've never slept with any woman," Sherlock confessed softly. And felt John's hand squeeze his firmly, affectionately.

 

*

 

John had taken the day off, with the wise foresight that their joint therapy session with Ella might need some additional processing after the fact. Whether because they would both need some time to themselves or because they would want to spend the day together, maybe talk some more. They went to sit in the little cafe next to the cemetery, right next door to the flower shop, where they drank coffee and ate a little something. Then they picked up Rosie and went home. 

Sherlock sat on the couch and Rosie crawled happily around him while John prepared her vegetable mash. Sherlock took care not to let Rosie trample his leg, which he had propped up. But she was mainly interested in his hair, playing with it and chattering enthusiastically. She laughed and cooed when Sherlock grabbed her and held her up over his head with his arms stretched out. Sherlock hadn't expected Rosie to recognise him and apparently like him. For her to be happy. They'd been through quite a lot together, but he was surprised that a ten-month-old infant remembered. At least remembered him and trusted him enough to stay with him when John went into the kitchen.

John took her from him and brought her to the kitchen table, settled her in the high chair, tied the bib around her neck, and placed the bowl with the mash in front of her. She ate whatever John spooned into her mouth without any resistance, changing off with the whole wheat crackers and banana slices John had set out for her too, which she stuffed into her mouth with her fingers. She wiggled cheerfully at the same time, laughing at Sherlock.

Sherlock had come into the kitchen and joined them at the table. He had nothing else to do, and it seemed appropriate to help John with the little girl, even if there wasn't really anything to help with. John had everything under control, and so did Rosie. 

They didn't speak, he and John. There was nothing to say. Things were good. John smiled when his eyes met Sherlock's, and Sherlock smiled back.

Later, when John had brought Rosie to bed for her midday nap, Sherlock stood at the window in the living room and looked out at the bourgeois greenery of the surrounding neighbourhood. Everything was so simple here, no challenges. Mediocre. And he realised he wanted to go back to Baker Street. Into the turmoil of the pulsating city. With Mrs Hudson, who always came into the flat at the wrong moment. With the drop-in clients. With John. And with Rosie.

Sherlock closed his eyes when John's hand rubbed across his back; a moment later, his friend leaned into him, his face pressed against Sherlock's shoulder. Sherlock took a deep breath then released slowly. They breathed. Simply breathed, eyes closed. Leaning together, close and solid. No room for doubt. _I want him. Everything he is._ A profound silence descended on them. There was nothing more to say. They had arrived at a place that was both unknown and familiar. So incredibly familiar.

John pulled away with a sigh when the doorbell rang. His fingers brushed the back of Sherlock's hand in apology.

"Are you expecting anyone?"

"No. I'll go check, all right?"

Sherlock nodded numbly. He leaned against the window frame, held onto it tightly. He was ready. He felt it in his body. There was no mistaking it. It was clear to him, and it was clear to John. There was a consensus. He was ready to sleep with John. And John with him.

The tense voices and footsteps promptly tore Sherlock out of his thoughts. Mycroft strode briskly into the living room, only to stop abruptly in his tracks as if an impulse to flee had taken hold of him and he was having trouble putting it off. He was pale, his face ashen and stony. A wave of emotion rolled off him, unrestrained and aggressive. Sherlock was both shocked and alarmed by it.

"I couldn't reach you," he growled at Sherlock without greeting, his voice like a repressed rumble from the gates of hell.

Sherlock had turned his phone off for the session with Ella, and forgot to turn it back on. But that was irrelevant now.

"What happened?" he asked fearfully.

"May I sit?"

John gestured to the armchair after he'd moved a few of Sherlock's clothes. Mycroft sat down; he looked exhausted and unfocused.

"We need to go to Sherrinford," he said.

"Did something happen to Eurus?"

Mycroft's eyes were strangely flat when he fixed Sherlock with an assessing look. He removed a white envelope from the breast pocket of his suit jacket and held it out to Sherlock. His hand was shaking.

Sherlock flinched back, shuddering. A sense of foreboding reached for him like a sticky black mass, squeezing off his throat and threatening to suffocate him. 

"What's happened to Eurus?" he whispered, shaken.


	12. Parting of the Ways

She was smiling. 

It looked like she was smiling.

Sherlock clung to John's arm. He'd clung to John's arm throughout the entire flight on the rear seat of the helicopter. And John had held him; he still held him now. Held him upright. Kept him on his feet. Sherlock swayed. A wispy fog surrounded him. It penetrated his sensory organs, numbing them. He wasn't sure whether this was even real. John was the only thing, his contact with John. Sherlock felt the heat and movement of John's body, smelled his perspiration, heard his voice. John was here; he was real. Sherlock recognised John, could perceive him with all of his senses and was certain of it. All the other facts drifted around the room like a cloud, remaining elusive.

Sherlock knew full well that they were at Sherrinford. He saw the woman. It was Eurus. Someone had cleaned her up. Her neck was covered up to her chin with a white sheet. They'd been told why. Eurus had virtually decapitated herself with the E string of her violin, had cut through her neck to her spine with the thin wire. She'd built herself an efficient killing machine with the eight strings – the four from her violin and the four replacement strings Sherlock had brought her. They'd found her sitting by the wall in a pool of her own blood, the thin string just barely holding her spine against the wall. The freight lift for the kitchen had come to a halt with a jerk. They'd found the strings wound around the electric motor, blocking it. And then Eurus, and behind her the tiny hole in the wall, the wires strung through the wall along the access cables, into the lift's motor box.

Mycroft leaned against the wall of the tiny room in the infirmary where Eurus lay in state. His face was white and blank; Sherlock only saw it for a moment, but it alarmed him more than the sight of the dead woman. Was it really Eurus? That lucid smile. Was she dead? Was she truly dead? Or was this a new game she was playing with them? Sherlock reached his hand out to the sheet covering Eurus's neck, but John held onto his wrist.

"Don't, Sherlock."

"I need to know whether she's dead."

"She's dead. There's no doubt about that. Spare yourself the sight."

"What if she's tricking us? She manipulates people's perceptions. She must have left her cell in order to attach the strings to the motor."

"She came and went here as she pleased. Don't you remember? She always gets what she wants."

"Exactly. She manipulates everyone. She tampers with our perception, John. She's not dead at all. She only wants to scare us."

"She's dead, Sherlock."

"How do you know?"

"They fixed up her corpse. And it is a corpse. The people here are able to determine that. And the surveillance cameras recorded what happened in the cell at 9:27 this morning."

"I want to see the video."

"No. Not now. Maybe later, sometime." John was still gripping Sherlock's arm. "Come on, let's get some fresh air. We both need it."

"No." Sherlock reached his hand out again, grasped the sheet covering Eurus's neck, and pulled it firmly down a few centimetres. Her head was sewn onto her body with large stitches. Sherlock stared at them doubtfully. A seam. No gaping wound. It could be an illusion. He felt the rough thread with the tips of his fingers. The flesh beneath it was cold and blue.

"We can ask Molly to perform an autopsy if you'd like," John said. He covered Eurus's neck with the white sheet again after Sherlock had withdrawn his trembling hand and clung once more to John's arm.

John gently pulled him away from the body. Sherlock let himself be dragged away, picked up his crutch and followed John, who led him by the arm, led him past a chalk-white Mycroft to the door.

"I'll need some time to organise the release and transport," Mycroft said to John as they passed by him. His voice sounded as if it came from another world. "Please stay with Sherlock until then. Don't let him out of your sight. Please."

"I won't leave him alone."

A security man walked them out to a sunny terrace. Sherlock stood there blinded for a moment when they left behind the artificial lights and the air-conditioned coolness of the inside rooms. Bright sunlight and summer heat rose up to meet them. The small stone-paved balcony was surrounded by a low wall. Behind it, the coast dropped off steeply into the ocean. A stone bench was built into the rough-hewn wall of the building which bordered the rear part of the terrace and provided shade. The security man gestured to it, and John and Sherlock sat in the shadow of the wall. Sherlock leaned against the rough, sun-warmed stone at his back, seeking contact with John beside him. John was his anchor to reality. Everything else was numb. Empty.

The sun beat down on the bare rocks of Sherrinford. The sky was dark blue and swept clean above the two men huddled together in the narrow strip of shade from the wall. There was almost no wind. Just a hint of a breeze blew across the island and the calm sea, which extended far into the distance before their eyes. Below, against the rocks on the other side of the wall, the surf frothed with rhythmic, leisurely splashes at regular intervals.

Sherlock stared across to the horizon, to the off-white line in the distance where the water met the sky. A couple of seagulls circled over the island, screeching shrilly. One of them settled on the wall over the drop-off, right in front of them. The bird eyed the two men by the wall with a curious look. Sherlock watched as it shifted restlessly from one leg to the other, tilting its head to one side to see them better. A bird. A creature from the outside world. The world out there. Sherlock knew he needed to break through to it. He needed to think. Needed to turn his brain on, to liberate his senses, to penetrate to reality. To the bird. He needed to see what was what. Needed to regain mastery over his own mind again. Now.

Sherlock focused his senses on the animal. Look closely. Differentiate. Eliminate. Categorise. Distinguish the features. Understand the context. Size: approx. 55 cm. Adult. Base feathers white, including the head. Grey wings with black tips that extend considerably past the white tail. Yellow eyes ringed with red. Yellow bill with large gonydeal spot, curved tip. Vivid yellow legs and feet, webbing between the three forward-facing toes. Order: Charadriformes. Family: Laridae. Western yellow-legged gull. _Larus michahellis_. Facts. Derived from observation and clear-cut classification. Direct perceptions compared with stored data. Deduction. A Holmes for a Watson.

Holmes kills Holmes.

Holmes kills Holmes for Watson. He'd agreed to the deal. He'd counted on himself being the victim. Or maybe Mycroft. A Holmes for a Watson. Not the first time. Probably not. A Holmes for a Watson. The jump from Bart's. The muzzle aimed at Mycroft's heart. The cold barrel against his own neck. Countdown. A Holmes for a Watson. Eurus's old game.

"We were with Ella at 9:27," John said into the silence, "and you had some sort of crisis, a breakdown. That was your sister, wasn't it? That's exactly when she died. At 9:27."

A cold shiver ran through Sherlock. Had he crashed along with Eurus? Had she thought of him in the last few seconds of her life? Had she dragged him with her part of the way? Had he dropped into the darkness with his sister? Into nothingness; into death?

"You sensed that she was dying," John said.

Sherlock remained silent. Grateful that John didn't expect him to say anything, that John simply held his hand. Everything was topsy-turvy inside him again. His thoughts kept falling through a grate, being shredded before they could fully form. Avoiding all attempts at catching and bundling them. His emotions were dead. Extinct. Sherlock was trying to find them, trying to find anything, but there was nothing.

Mycroft had someone fetch them after a good half hour. They hadn't spoken for most of that time. Just once, at some point during the silent period on the stone bench at Sherrinford, Sherlock had said forlornly, "I need you, John."

And John had answered: "I'll stay with you. Forever, if you want."

"Yes. I do."

 

*

 

It was an official envelope from the penal institution at Sherrinford. 'Sherlock' was written on it in a swooping, uneven hand. Inside were two sheets of white, unlined paper, covered in writing from the top left to the bottom right, large letters, no margins. Huge capitals. Non-uniform slant, sometimes forward, sometimes backward. The same handwriting that had been on the sheet music. Sherlock carefully compared the individual letters. There was no question: it was Eurus's handwriting.

Unlike the sheet music, where the stark contrast between the discrete, highly legible musical notations and the overdone alphabetic symbols was rather conspicuous, the letter didn't follow any standardised format. Eurus had bowed to the five-line musical notation, had accepted it as a system. Her letters, however, her verbal notations, were chaotic. The only thing that delimited the missive was the size and shape of the paper.

Eurus's message was barely legible. Sherlock tried to decipher it word by word. He'd already skimmed the letter when Mycroft brought it. But it had been too much for him to really read it, paralysed as he had been by Mycroft's news. He hadn't had any time either. They'd left for Sherrinford immediately, as soon as John had rung Mrs Hudson and she'd promised to come straightaway and take care of Rosie. Sherlock hadn't relinquished possession of the letter since then, had stuck it in the breast pocket of his suit jacket and carried it with him the whole time, unable to give it any of his attention. A red-hot document resting on his chest. Eurus's last words, which he could only decipher in part. It wasn't until now, back at John's flat, that he had enough strength, peace and quiet to face up to the pages and what they contained.

_I'm bored. Just the violin all the time. And just John. Victor was first. It was easy to take him away from you, but I lost you too in the process. Now John and that quaint domesticity with him that you're giving away your life for. I didn't take him away from you; he was too perfect a pawn for that. I could use him to steer you wherever I wanted. It was a fantastic game, and I had loads of fun with it. But it's over now. A Holmes for a Watson, that was the deal. Our business is hereby concluded. You've got two Watsons. Consider the extra one a bonus. And I have what I wanted: you, Sherlock. The rest is boring. You'll understand that; we're similar, you and I. My life is a waste, so I've ended the game. Nothing can separate us anymore. I'll live in your memory forever._  
_Thanks for the music, little brother. And thank you for your love. It saved me._  
_Eurus, née Holmes_

Sherlock sat on the couch in the dark, wearing his pyjama bottoms and a t-shirt. The letter lay on the coffee table in front of him. The bands of light from the cars passing by outside wandered across the table, making the white paper glow for a brief moment, the unsteady handwriting coalescing like a drawing out of the darkness then receding again, sketches from a brilliant old master. Impenetrable thoughts. Hieroglyphs.

"This will help you sleep," John said. He hadn't turned on the lamp, stood in front of Sherlock in the living room's ambient night-time glow.

Sherlock took the pill without balking, emptied the glass of water that John held out to him to wash it down. John took back the glass and held out his hand.

"Come on. I want you to come sleep by me."

"I can sleep here, John."

"Not in your condition. Be reasonable, Sherlock. Come on."

Sherlock took John's hand and let himself be pulled to his feet. He accepted the crutch that John shoved under his arm. He could put some weight on his leg by now, only using one crutch to move around the flat. But now, he was grateful to lean on John's shoulder with his other hand. He was tired, along with still feeling empty and disorientated. He didn't have the strength to second-guess the decisions John made for him. Much less to resist.

"This is Mary's bed," he said faintly when he lay in the darkness next to John a few minutes later.

"That's not important right now. Don't worry about it," John replied.

Sherlock took a deep breath. He felt the pill slowly taking effect. His body became heavy and warm. He turned onto his side, assuming a sleeping position. The bed smelled like John. He heard John breathing right in front of him, heard the rustling of the blanket as John straightened it out. John had turned to face him.

"It's my fault, John," Sherlock whispered. "Eurus's death is my fault."

"No, it isn't. It was suicide. Your sister suffered from a serious psychosis. It's not unusual for people with that illness to kill themselves."

"It was a trade." Sherlock felt sleep threatening to overtake him, silencing his voice. He was seized by a sudden panic. Fear of a fall into the obscure darkness of his subconscious, where James Moriarty wore a bridal veil and Eurus, her throat slit, played her games with him on the precipice of a cold, wet waterfall. 

"John. John! Don't leave."

"I'm here."

A warm hand on his shoulder. Fingers brushing his arm, the back of his hand. Movement beside him. The mattress shaking. Breath, very close. Someone else's body heat under the cover. Arms holding him firmly. Pulling him into a place of deep, gentle comfort. Sherlock let himself fall and barely had time to feel it before he drifted off.

 

*

 

When Sherlock woke up, it was light out. The clock said 10:12. He'd slept more than ten hours, deep and dreamless. John lay beside him in bed, still asleep. Sherlock carefully extricated himself from underneath the light summer blanket and limped to the bathroom. The flat smelled like coffee. Sherlock glanced into the kitchen when he emerged from the bathroom. John had already prepared breakfast. The table was set for two. John had got up and must have also already drunk a cup of coffee, then crawled back into bed with him. For whatever reason. Maybe he'd still been tired and could sleep in because Mrs Hudson wasn't bringing Rosie back until the afternoon. Maybe he hadn't wanted to let Sherlock wake up alone. 

Eurus. Eurus was dead. The memory of the previous day was crystal clear and sharp, but far away. As if he were looking through a spyglass, able to make out every detail but all the while knowing he was at a safe distance.

Sherlock went back to the bedroom. For a few moments, he debated whether he should have a shower and get the day started, or whether he should lie back down. He decided on the latter.

He stretched out beside John and regarded his friend, who was more dozing than sleeping and now drowsily opened his eyes, looking at Sherlock still half in a dream. His sandy hair mussed amidst the pillows and blanket, grey eyes soft and bemused, stubble. And then memories flitting across his face like a shadow. Worry lines. 

Sherlock lifted his hand and touched John's hand where it rested on the pillow, brushed his fingertips across the tendons on the back of his hand. A spontaneous impulse, no hidden intentions. Yearning for the warmth of the night.

"How are you?" John asked softly.

Sherlock didn't know how to answer that. He felt heavy. Something in him had broken, he felt that quite clearly. But there was also relief and a sense of being free. Fresh strength beneath the shards. A pulse beating within him. Life. John. His fingertips ran up from the back of John's hand to his cheek. The bristly resistance of his stubble. John's lips were soft. They parted when he touched them, outlining them with his fingertips. 

John sucked in a deep breath. Instantaneously, his breaths came quicker and a wave of energy radiated out from him, crossing over to Sherlock. Sherlock gazed into those grey eyes and saw that John knew, knew with absolute certainty, what was happening to them. He felt it in his body, it was clear to him and it was clear to John, and there was a consensus. Arousal flowed into him as if he were an empty vessel, filling him down to the last pore. He leaned toward John, and as his lips sought out his friend's, his fingers dug into the shaggy blond hair between the pillows and blanket.

John drew him in close. Held him tight. John's hands caressed his body, under his t-shirt, pulling it off him. Their bodies ground together, their swollen genitals stimulating each other through the thin material. Sherlock was on fire. He couldn't think anymore. He only knew one thing: he wanted it, wanted John, wanted him with no holds barred, wanted him now. He felt his hand trembling as he slid his fingers inside the waistband of John's shorts. John rolled onto his back and moaned out loud when Sherlock brushed over his bare, hard cock, took it in his hand. John's advanced state of arousal made him completely lose his mind. He caressed John's penis, intoxicated by it, by the fact that it was possible, that he was allowed, that John was reacting so strongly, that John was lost in his hand. It drove him mad with desire. He wanted John. Wanted to belong to him, to have him. Completely.

But then Sherlock felt both of his friend's hands on the sides of his head, in his hair. John turned over so they were facing each other. Sherlock stopped what he was doing, gazed dreamily into the grey eyes before him which were overflowing with lust. They looked at each other. Just looked. For a long time. Amazed. John's fingers ran through Sherlock's hair. They were both breathing hard and fast. The tempestuous hunger drained away, drained into a wide sea that both of them slid into. Together. Ready to be what they were to each other. To know each other. Connected. 

When their lips reached for each other again, there was such a deep desire and tenderness in the act that Sherlock felt light-headed. He gave himself over when John pushed him gently down onto his back so that he could extend his injured leg off to the side. He surrendered to the overwhelming feeling of utter abandon and absolute trust. He stretched his body out under John's loving hands, drunkenly returning the intimate kisses, enjoying the slow, lascivious rhythm with which John rubbed against his thigh while John's hand stroked him, driving him into an intoxicating ecstasy, red-hot and unerring.

John paused just as Sherlock thought he was going to lose himself completely. Their eyes met, both panting, past the furthest reaches, utterly lost in each other and in what they were doing. John moistened one hand with spit before he reached into Sherlock's curls with his other one and captured him with a long, deep kiss as his wet, gentle fingers caused Sherlock's plump glans to overflow. 

Sherlock arched up, gasping for air. A hoarse cry broke out of his throat. His semen welled up into John's hand, he felt it, felt John's affectionate grip on his cock, felt the wetness. And he heard John's low moan against his neck, felt the contractions on his thigh, the surge of wet heat erupting out of John. Space tilted. Time crumbled. Sherlock sank into John. There was only John. Only the two of them. He and John. John's eyes, a deep ocean grey. John's hands. John's lips. John's sighs. John's embrace. John's warmth. John's tenderness. John's comfort. John. Only John. John and himself; Sherlock.

It wasn't until later that the awareness of the loss of his sister, the anger, the struggle with fate, and the grief all crashed over Sherlock. A couple of hours later. And with it all of the questions regarding the meaning, the why, the omissions and guilt. Questions that no one could ever answer.


	13. Nucleus

Sherlock drew back the curtain a bit and looked down onto Baker Street. John was returning with the shopping. Twenty minutes. John wouldn't leave him alone longer than that. Sherlock rested his forehead against the window frame and closed his eyes for a moment, listening down the stairwell to hear the front door open. John would want him to eat something. And he'd do it, he'd eat something for John. He'd given up.

Eurus's composition had assumed an idiosyncratic musical form. He'd struggled with it day and night. Bitterly. But now he didn't practise the piece anymore. He only played through it, several times a day, bewildered by what it had become. He'd given up wanting to understand it. Given up second-guessing every note, examining every phrase a thousand times for what it might mean; digging for the true core in the line of every motif, seeking a statement, an emotion, an idea. A message. But there was no message. Other than that he didn't understand. That he understood his sister far less than he'd thought. 'With Pain's Dying Breath'. The piece remained chaotic and frigid. Sherlock tried to accept it. Maybe because he was so exhausted.

The worst of the nights were over. The nightmares. Eurus with her throat slit, wearing a bridal veil at the precipice of a waterfall. Pushing a pale, hollow-eyed Victor into the watery depths, even as he gaped at Sherlock with a lost look in his eyes. Sherlock desperately holding onto John, who wanted to jump too. Clinging to John and both of them toppling over the edge, falling and falling and falling. Being unable to hold onto John any longer and losing him in the tumult of the rushing waters. He always forced himself to wake up at that point. It usually worked, and he surfaced drenched in sweat and gasping, reached for John, who lay beside him, and crawled into his arms. 

Sometimes arousal washed over him without warning when he nestled in close to John, when he inhaled John's scent, and he caressed John and awakened his lust too, and they made love while still half asleep. John let him. Feeling John's semen, feeling his own, was like a nodal point in the chaos of his emotions. A place where things which remained nameless came together and formed connections. Opening a conduit to his grief and giving him peace. Connecting him not only with John, but also with life and death and the knowledge of creation and impermanence.

His physical connection to John had become so natural in a matter of just a few days. It was both simple and comprehensive. Maybe because all those things that are so central and dramatic for human beings are no more than trivial laws of nature for the universe. Sexuality. Birth. Death. _All hearts are broken, all lives end._ Mycroft's motto had lost any trace of cynicism.

Sherlock heard John set the shopping bags down on the table, place his key beside them, and take off his jacket. Then he came in to Sherlock. John ran his hand down Sherlock's back, and Sherlock turned around and hugged him. The way he often did these days, answering a spontaneous instinct, tender and needy. In need of warmth and affirmation.

"The funeral's tomorrow," John said a little while later as they ate the omelet John had cooked. "Mycroft wants to come by this afternoon to discuss everything."

Sherlock nodded mutely.

Mycroft dropped in every day under some pretext or other. On his advice, they'd moved to Baker Street, where there were no neighbours who would be kept awake or driven mad by the violin those first few nights. Mrs Hudson, Molly, and the babysitter were taking care of Rosie until further notice. A locum doctor had taken over John's patients at the surgery. Mycroft wanted it like that, wanted John to be there for Sherlock, and had organised everything to make it so.

"Are you going to play Eurus's piece?" John asked.

"I don't know yet. Probably not." Sherlock knew he'd have to decide. Mycroft would want to know today.

Eurus' piece was incomprehensible; even if he interpreted it as a gift to posterity, it was still the music of a very sick person. He would have preferred it if Eurus had composed something more conventional. She'd played all of the classical pieces and knew how to write and perform them. She'd proven that several times over with her embellishments and second violin parts. She could have composed like Bach or Brahms. 

Maybe he'd play Bach for her. Or Brahms. None of the pieces they'd played together, though. That came too close for him. Too many emotions. He didn't want to risk anything in front of other people, even if most of them would be family. Maybe Molly and Mrs Hudson as well, someone from Sherrinford; nursing staff who had cared for Eurus. Sherlock wanted to play for Eurus, but he wanted to maintain his composure. His cool. No demonstration of sibling affection that went beyond an acknowledgment of genetically determined similarity.

The truth was different, of course. Eurus had lived through him, and he through her. She'd possessed him, as he had her. The whole time. A constant connection – even if one side had remained unaware of it. Everything he'd become was because of her. Everything she'd done was because of him. She'd taken Victor away from him. She'd forced him to leave John and possibly even made sure that Mary came between them. She'd seduced John, destroyed the little family which had also been Sherlock's. She'd announced herself as soon as John and he had reconciled. Had the disaster at Sherrinford been one last attempt to separate him from John? An exchange. The girl that embodied his happiness in exchange for the one who had embodied his unhappiness. A replacement. Rosie for Eurus.

"You're thinky," John said gently.

Sherlock looked up and met his partner's eyes. He'd stopped eating, was just poking at his omelet without realising he was doing so. Half of it was still on his plate. John waited.

"Rosie," Sherlock said in a low voice as he slid a piece of egg onto his fork. "Is Rosie coming to the funeral tomorrow?"

"Yes. Mrs Hudson and Molly are bringing her. I hope that's okay with you. I thought... well, I thought she's part of the family." Uncertainty in John's tone.

Sherlock swallowed the mouthful of egg. "Of course she's part of the family," he said. "I was thinking anyway that we should... I mean, Baker Street isn't exactly ideal, but we could arrange things. We still have the room upstairs and Mrs Hudson has an extra room she's using for storage that we could let as well."

"Mrs Hudson's already set it up as a nursery," John said. "Rosie sleeps there when she stays with her. But I think Rosie should sleep upstairs with me as long as she's still small. We'd have to take stock again later."

"I want you to sleep with me," Sherlock said plainly. He didn't ever intend to leave John out again. "We'll have Rosie in with us as long as she's too small for her own room."

"She's not too small for her own room, Sherlock. She has one now."

"Fine," Sherlock said, unsure whether the topic was closed now and everything clear. "Good." He ate some more of the omelet. It tasted surprisingly good.

"While we're on the topic," John started, "if I don't need to pay rent on the flat any longer, I could quit the practice and take on a couple of shifts at Bart's again. That would mean I could help out more with cases. And Bart's has a nursery. Rosie would have more structure in her day."

Sherlock swallowed the omelet and looked at John in surprise. Were they in the midst of planning their future together?

"But let's say good-bye to your sister first and wait until the worst of the wounds have healed. And until we're more sure about us," John said.

"I'm sure about us, John. I've never been more sure of anything." Sherlock spoke softly. It hurt to have to say it. It made him aware of the fact that John had his own life. Made his own decisions. That there were two of them. Two individuals who needed to coordinate. He'd forgot about that during those days of mental insufficiency and emotional confusion, that time of blindness and deafness, when it had been so natural for John to be there, day and night. That was going to change now. They'd return to the daily grind now that the emergency was over.

John's fingers slid between his. Sherlock looked down at their hands on the table. Both masculine, holding onto each other tenderly yet firmly.

"There's no reason to doubt it, Sherlock. Just give things some time to settle, okay?"

 

*

 

The funeral was very small and intimate. The service short. Mycroft said a few words. Sherlock played the Adagio from Bach's Sonata Number 1 in G Minor. As he played, he thought about the wonderful music he'd played with Eurus, the way their violins' voices had entwined and caressed each other, the wordless understanding and harmony. A sense of togetherness that hadn't been possible for so many years. The happiness therein as unexpected and unpredictable as Eurus herself.

Sherlock played the Adagio with his eyes closed, disregarding the tears that ran down his face. He couldn't prevent them. It was what it was. The same with John. Things simply were what they were. They could be fought but not conquered, could only be surrendered to in the end. Death and love.

The summer sun shone outside; it was warm and friendly. A light wind played in the leaves of the trees in the cemetery. They stood silently at the graveside for a while after the urn had been lowered. Just the family. Mycroft and their parents. Mrs Hudson with Rosie. Sherlock, leaning on his cane, his other hand holding John's. He'd simply taken it and John had held it. He didn't care what the others thought.

Rosie started grizzling and John took her from Mrs Hudson, passing her to Sherlock because she was reaching insistently for him. Sherlock took her and put her over his shoulder, held on firmly. The warm, sweet scent. The heavy head resting on his neck, the small body nestling against him. The familiar, damp snuffling at his collar. Rosie had stuck her thumb in her mouth and was sucking on it. She was tired. Her eyes fell shut as they stood there.

Sherlock stared down at the flowers that lay on the fresh grave. That which remained. A spot in the earth with a stone and a name. Mary. Eurus. A handful of flowers, left there by people who went away again. People whose lives continued. Elsewhere.

Rosie for Eurus. An exchange. Eurus had left, Rosie came back. Eurus had cut his past short. Rosie demanded a future. Maybe Rosie would play the violin some day. Maybe he'd tell her about his sister sometime, later on. Maybe. Maybe she'd look like Mary when she got older. She had John's eyes. Both familiar things. Family.

"Can you carry her? With your leg?" John asked, tearing Sherlock out of his thoughts. The others had already left.

"I'll make it to the exit," Sherlock said. He looked into John's beautiful eyes and smiled. Was surprised to realise that he was smiling, that there was light and optimism inside him. For the first time in a long while.

 

*

 

Musgrave lay peacefully surrounded by green meadows and mighty trees. The late summer sun cast the crumbling building in a warm light. Even the black skeleton of the collapsed roof with its stone chimneys grasping for the sky like ominous cenotaphs had lost something of its shock value. Crickets chirped in the grass between the old gravestones. The quacking of ducks came from the nearby bend in the river.

"I've found it, John." Sherlock held a small, charred wooden box out to John. It was fitted with metal bindings and looked like a miniature treasure chest.

John had waited for him outside with Rosie. The little girl was babbling as she played with the colourful pebbles John had gathered with her along the shallow riverbank and laid out on a blanket.

John had stood up when he saw Sherlock limping toward him, and now he looked him over from head to foot, checking him with a worried expression. Sherlock knew he must look a fright. He'd been crawling around in the soot, dust, and filth of the burnt-down house. His suit was ruined at any rate, and his hands were crusted with dirt. He'd lost his cane somewhere inside the house, so he was leaning on a wooden post he'd found to replace it.

"May I?" John asked and reached into Sherlock's hair to pull out a handful of dusty cobwebs. "A treasure chest?" he said as he brushed the sticky strands off on one of the old gravestones.

Sherlock opened the little box and took out an old, singed photograph. "This is Victor," he said. To his horror, his voice cracked, and he felt his legs start to give out. He'd only wanted to show John the picture, but now he hesitated. It wasn't enough to show the picture to John. He put it back into the treasure chest, closed the lid, and sat down awkwardly with it on the edge of Rosie's blanket. He looked up at John, who stood there uncertainly in front of him gazing down at him.

"I'm sorry," Sherlock whispered hoarsely. "I just need a moment."

John lowered himself to sit next to him on the blanket. "It's fine, Sherlock. You don't need to do anything, you know. You don't owe me anything. It's in the past. You were a kid. It's all fine."

John's warm, comforting hand on his back. Sherlock opened the little chest again and nudged it in John's direction a bit so that he could see inside too. The forgotten treasures of a childhood that was long gone.

"What's this?" John asked, pointing at the bones.

Memories. Mental images. The image of a perfect skeleton on a rock. The fascination which the tiny hairsbreadth bones had triggered in him. The spread wings, the filigree spine, the head bent back with the beak open.

"The bones of a bird," Sherlock explained. "Probably a robin. It was a complete skeleton. It lay spread out in the moss on a rock, having appeared from under the frozen snow following an especially cold winter. I was afraid the wind would blow away the fragile bones and wanted to preserve the skeleton. But it fell apart when I touched it."

Sherlock rummaged in the box and took out the bird's skull – it was astonishingly light – and placed it in John's hand. The spine. Tiny, perfect vertebrae. Incredible.

"Fascinating, isn't it?" Sherlock remembered how amazed he'd been at the beauty of the delicate skeleton. "And this was my most precious gemstone." Sherlock laid a piece of blue glass in John's hand. A thick shard, perhaps from the bottom of a bottle. "Oh yes, and this here was my seal. My secret pirate seal." Sherlock smiled as he dug the flat stone out of the treasure chest. They'd etched seals for themselves in the limestone with an old nail. His showed a skull and a sword. And the symbol in the bottom left was a kraken. "Victor's was the same," Sherlock said as he put the stone into John's hand, "but his had a whale down here instead of the kraken."

Sherlock took out the creased photograph and looked at it. The colours had faded, and the coating had bubbled up on one side from the heat of the fire. The picture showed an expanse of landscape: meadow, riverbank, water, with the boy in the middle distance. Sherlock looked at him. He was wearing wellingtons and a raincoat, holding a big piece of driftwood in one hand. His hair was fair, and he was smiling into the camera. The shocking thing was that Victor didn't look the way Sherlock remembered him here. The boy in the picture was a stranger. And yet the photograph triggered a vague memory, somewhere very far away. An image that couldn't be pinned down.

"This is Victor," Sherlock said to John and handed him the photograph. While John examined it silently, Sherlock looked through his suit jacket for the tool kit he always had on him, then took out the magnifier.

John returned the picture to him without saying a word. Sherlock looked at the face in the photograph through the magnifier, searching for anything that was familiar to him, anything he recognised. But the closer he looked, the more whatever it was got lost in the granules of the coating. He should have known. He did know. It wouldn't do any good to look for Victor with the magnifier. He didn't exist anymore. He didn't even exist in this photograph anymore. And he only existed in Sherlock's memory as a fleeting shadow that no longer showed its face.

John wrapped his arm quietly around Sherlock's shoulder's and carefully returned the items he was holding to the little treasure chest. Sherlock added the photograph to it and closed the box. They sat there silently for a while, Sherlock leaning on John's shoulder, the treasures of his childhood in his lap. Rosie played with the pebbles behind them, chattering to herself, telling stories no one understood.

Sherlock brooded. He'd found the treasure chest, had still known where he'd hidden it, had guessed that the fire wouldn't have been able to destroy it there. He'd been so intent on finding it. The secrets it held had been so large and gleaming in his memory, so meaningful and profound. But now. The dreams of a little boy who no longer existed. Who'd grown up. A man now. Who had gone his own way. The past had faded, and with it the secrets in the treasure chest. Just things now. Bones. Glass. Paper. No more meaningful than pebbles at the headwaters of a river that had long since reached the sea.

Musgrave. Eurus had brought him back here. He himself had forgot and blocked out this place from his early childhood. Now the burnt-down house with the fake graves was part of his memory again. Things he wanted to let go of but not forget.

Sherlock stood up.

"Do you need my help?" John asked.

"No. Stay with Rosie. I'll be right back."

His leg hurt. Sherlock leaned on the post. The treasure chest under one arm, he went down to the peaceful, slowly meandering river. It made a wide curve here, where he'd often used to play on its flat bank. Sherlock stared out at the water for a while; it flowed so lazily that it almost seemed not to be moving at all. But it was. Constant and sure. 

Time to let go. The blue gemstone. Sherlock tossed it out. A gift to the water. The small white stones as well. They'd been more valuable than diamonds once, the currency of a happy pirate. Now they belonged to the river. The limestone seal too. Bluebeard with the kraken. Wasn't that the fate of every pirate on the seas? The metal button. The glass marbles. Seashells. Snail shells. Sherlock threw all of his treasures out into the water. And the water took them. Took them away. Swallowed them up. The photograph of Victor too. Sherlock tore it up into little pieces before handing it over to the water. He watched the tiny scraps of paper for a while as they drifted away. The bird bones. Sherlock looked around. He placed the delicate little bones on a large, flat rock near the meadow. Bird bones are hollow and as light as feathers. The wind would carry them away.

At the very bottom of the treasure chest lay pieces of a pinecone that had disintegrated. Sherlock tipped them out onto the ground, but not before first removing the almost spherical green pebble. Victor had given him the stone as a token of their unbreakable friendship. Sherlock put it into his pocket. Then he went back to the river and flung the empty treasure chest far out. It floated for a few seconds before the metal fittings dragged it down. It filled with water and sank.

The round stone lay smooth and warm in his hand. Sherlock hesitated. Should he take it with him? Give it to John? Only one of the options he was considering felt right. Sherlock put the stone down on the ground amongst the hundreds of other pebbles there. Leaving here what belonged here, to this place. Beginning a new life. With his new family. 

Sherlock stretched and took a deep breath, in and out. The air was oxygen-rich and smelt of vegetation. A faint breeze rippled the river's surface. Downstream, a heron stood motionless in the shallow water.

Sherlock turned around and went back. John stood there holding Rosie and watching him. Sherlock went over and stopped in front of him. John looked sombre. Sherlock gazed intently into the grey depths of his eyes.

"What have you done?" John asked, stricken.

"It was necessary," Sherlock answered. "I want to be free for our new life. Rosie needs a godfather who assumes responsibility. And you need a partner you can count on."

"And you? What do you need?" John's eyes were earnest and full of concern.

Sherlock thought about it for a moment. "The sea," he finally said upon reflection. "The core. The only beloved. You."

Slowly, very slowly, John's eyes filled with tears. Sherlock hugged him. Hugged John and Rosie. They held onto each other tight, very tight. Sherlock pressed his face against John's damp cheek, buried it in John's neck, squeezed John close to him. He sensed his own tears spilling over when he felt Rosie's small hands in his hair. She was pulling on it cheerfully and squealing with delight.

 

THE END


End file.
